


L'Hiver

by Ethike_arete



Series: Les Saisons [4]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, French History RPF, French Revolution RPF
Genre: Death, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Politics, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Thermidor, Éléonore Duplay/Maximilien Robespierre - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-03-08 09:20:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18891700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ethike_arete/pseuds/Ethike_arete
Summary: Like a blanket of fog, death had always hung over the Revolution and those fighting to establish and uphold the Republic.  Now, with the threat of further conspiracies and the forces of counter-revolution beginning to show their hand, Robespierre must choose how to face the encroaching threat.  The question more often on his mind, however, is who will be brought down with him.





	1. In the Calmness of a Pure Conscience

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Readers,
> 
> Here we are: Thermidor. I cannot say this chapter has been easy to write, and I suspect the ones to come won't be any easier.
> 
> If you are a new reader, I should perhaps mention that this fic will make very little sense without having read _L'Automne_ , from which it continues on almost directly.
> 
> I haven't tagged for major character death, as I assume anyone reading French Revolution fic is probably well aware that Robespierre dies at the end. Do be aware, however, obviously the following chapters deal heavily with death and the emotions accompanying it, and some of Robespierre's descriptions of the corresponding 'death of the Republic' are (I think) reasonably intense- particularly given that Liberty/the Republic are consistently personified as female. Per assorted reports of the time, I'll also mention that Georges Couthon is treated particularly poorly by his colleagues during this period, and there are assorted references to ableism in this chapter. 
> 
> Rated E for later chapters.
> 
> Also, to billspilledquill: Your belated birthday gift is on my mind, I assure you, but I couldn't bear to gift you something as miserable as a Thermidor fic! When I am done this, however, I will write something happier.

  
**Messidor, An II**

  
  
_Blérancourt, near Noyon, August 19, 1790_

  
  
_You who support the tottering country against the torrent of despotism and intrigue, you whom I only know, like God, through his wonders; I speak to you, sir, to ask you to unite with me in order to save my sad country. The city of Gouci has relocated (this rumour goes around here) the free markets from the town of Blérancourt. Why do the cities devour the privileges of the countryside? Will there remain no more of them to the latter than size and taxes?_  
  
_Support, please, with all your talent, an address that I make for the same letter, in which I request the reunion of my heritage with the national areas of the canton, so that one lets to my country a privilege without which it has to die of hunger._  
  
_I do not know you, but you are a great man. You are not only the deputy of a province; you are one of humanity and of the Republic. Please, make it that my request be not despised._  
  
_I have the honour to be, Sir, your most humble, most obedient servant._  
  
_St Just, constituent of the department of Aisne_  
_To Monsieur de Robespierre in the National Assembly in Paris_  
  
  
Almost four years had passed, yet Maxime still treasured this simple missive, which the tender misgivings of his heart always forbid him to dispose of. In the tumultuous years before ever he laid eyes on Saint-Just, it had been Maxime's talisman: words of faith reread in moments of doubt.  If he had not done so in some time, it was only because Antoine’s presence had filled its place from the moment he first arrived in Paris.    
  
Now, however, he and Antoine were parted by their duties if not by distance.  His dear friend remained a whirlwind through the Bureau, the Convention and the Committee while Maxime, in self-imposed exile from all three, supported Antoine, Couthon and Payan from his room in the Duplay's and focused his efforts upon the Club.  The warmth stoked between them helped to keep their mutual courage, to fortify them as they struggled alone through the long night of the Republic.  Every evening, then, Maxime took up Antoine's letter just as he had in the past, savouring  words he heard in his friend's inimitable voice.  Though Maxime once flushed at the effusion of its opening sentence, he knew now that ‘Support, please, with all your talent’ was its most meaningful line.  That what he first took for a boy’s idolatrous worship was, instead, a declaration of unity: a claim upon Maxime’s entire soul rather than an offering of Antoine’s youthful self.  Maxime often brushed the note with his lips, as though by touching some lingering trace of Antoine’s skin thereon, his kiss might pass to the hand busily penning notes in the Police Bureau.  His face pressed close to the rough grain, he imagined the paper still carried a lingering scent of tilled soil and ripening wheat, stone walls, the sweat on Antoine’s palm as he once clutched the letter to his breast and hastened to make the post.  
  
Yet though this missive comforted Maxime’s nights and delivered some scant, fractured hours of rest, he woke with a single thought:     
  
_The Republic is dying._  
  
She who sprang forth fully-formed from the spent loins of a broken past; who planted her strong feet upon French soil, spear in hand, and called their hearts; She, whom Maxime had loved and served most faithfully: dying.  What was she become, the goddess of French liberty?  France still, but robbed of the fullness of womanhood, her figure worn ragged, Her breasts flat and starved, Her ribs like curved, bare branches beneath the skin.  Black, consumptive crescents shadowed Her fading eyes and Her body bloomed with the bruises of deceit, the open wounds of ongoing war.  Her voice- once both hymn and _chant de guerre_ \- choked upon the blood poured down Her gaping throat by villains like Fouché.  Where once Maxime walked in the shadowed grace of Her advancing steps, now he gathered Her in weak embrace, his back a humble shield ‘gainst the blows rained down upon Her.  She was a great weight to bear, the Republic, and he but a frail and tired man to do it.    
   
  
Had they toppled a king to raise another tyrant in his place?  Driven princes from the battlefield to feed such howling, ambitious furies on French blood?  Had they been spared the crush of Louis Capet’s heel, the maw of Pitt’s machinations, only so they might lose to vice?  To die bringing forth Liberty was the essence of _vertu_ , but to have stood bathed in Her light merely to cast Her aside in the gutter: what deeper shame could exist?  What greater betrayal was there, than for these corrupt members of the Convention and Committees to infect honest deputies?  Than to attack Her staunchest defenders, squandering the People's hope and effacing their own vile intrigues by attributing heaped corpses and foul ambitions to Her best allies?  
  
If Maxime’s first thought were for the Republic, however, his bitter musings spawned further revelation: _I am going to die._  
  
In the beginning, the threat of death had fallen upon the shoulders of every representative like thick fog on an autumn morning upon the shoulders.  By the summer of Year II, it had settled in their bones like old age, thinning hair and frosting it grey, hollowing cheeks and painting shadows ‘neath their eyes.  Even Antoine’s face had not escaped a map of fragile lines demarcating the boundaries of every emotion permitted to grace it.  As certain animals survive in harsh and inhospitable domains, they all had been shaped by uncertainty and turmoil.  Yet martyrdom, though oft’ on Maxime’s lips, had always seemed nebulous: a distant uncertainty, a slow encroachment like the parching of summer grass.  Somehow, death became a state of being than a singular fate.  Now, however, the thought of it seemed inescapable, sharp and clear as a shard of broken glass.  The consolation of philosophy had not prepared him for this moment: less the terror of dying, and more the sorrow of failure.  Only his trusted friends gathered close to aid her.  Georges rallied the Convention with his speeches as Payan held the Commune and battled endlessly against corruption.  Bonbon and Philippe, with their boundless energy, hurtled like young lieutenants into the thick of every argument and mission.  And Antoine, constant and clever, took Maxime’s place like Patroclus donning Achilles’ armour, his every word and deed in service to their shared ideals.  He carried Maxime with steps that neither stumbled, nor slowed, nor wavered.

If any consolation existed it was this: that if the Republic was an idea, an ideal, She would die only to be reborn again, stronger and more radiant than ever.  Other men would battle for Her in the streets of Paris, lie broken upon the same cobblestones and fall to the bayonets of a different tyrant.  Those men would rewrite this sorry tale so the truth shone forth.  Would treasure the words of true and faithful patriots, remembering them as one remembers old friends.  In their own fraternal bonds they would seek to recreate the love of _patrie_ and _peuple_ and one another that bound Maxime to Georges or Philippe; perhaps some, even, would discover their strength in the antiquated love of a dear and loyal friend, burn with it as Maxime himself burned.  
  
_I will bear it,_ Maxime thought, _bear it all to the very end_.  He would give of himself until She needed him no more, ‘til there was no more, even, to take, and go to the grave as his Creator willed.  Such was the nature of all great change: it could not be purchased with words alone, but must come from blood and sacrifice.   If he died, it would be knowing that the immortal ideas they had spoken would take shape again, long after his death.  There was, he thought, a happiness in such knowledge.  Maxime swallowed this comfort gratefully: a thin gruel when otherwise he might have starved. 

 

*

A ridiculous dictator, Collot had called him on the final night that Maxime attended the Committee.  _Dictator!  Dictator!  Dictator!_ The accusation came ever more to mind, as he heard it murmured by faceless men as he merely passed by in the street.  As he found himself compared to an entire encyclopedia of criminals and dictators and tyrants in the deluge of letters that spilled across his desk with each passing day.  Was he so despised?  So unworthy?  At times Maxime read and reread them at such length that Éléonore, discovering him thus engaged, snatched the notes from his hands and ripped them apart.  On other occasions, Bonbon balled them up to hurl from the window, calling apologies to the workmen below.  Antoine set them alight; let the flame burn down so close to his skin that Maxime held his breath.  That his mouth, closing ‘round those fingertips a moment later, soothed heat and tasted ash.    
  
_I am going to die,_ he thought again, and yet again.  The outcome seemed almost inevitable now, and yet the fear that once accompanied this simple statement had long since dissipated, leaving certainty to crystalise.  It was the other thought, following in its footsteps, that troubled his heart: _I am going to die, and those I love will die with me_.  
  
Much as the likes of Tallien and Fouché might imagine that Maxime composed notes and tallies of suspects during his absence from Convention and Committee, or wrote endless lists of enemies to feed the guillotine, the only names Maxime called to mind belonged to his companions.  In the dark hours when sleep eluded him, the silvered early ‘morn before full sunrise, he lay awake, imagining the crimes for which they could be accused:  
  
Claude-François de Payan- crime: loyalty, pursuing the cause of morality and justice with rigour and zeal.  
  
Jacques-Louis David- crime: passionate devotion to the Revolution.  Love for Marat and the tyrant, Robespierre.  
  
Maurice Duplay- crime: sheltering the monster, Robespierre.  Benefiting from a tyrant’s largess.  
  
Augustin Bon Joseph Robespierre- crime: fraternal love.  Abjuring the native sweetness of his character in faithful devotion to his elder brother and the Republic.  
  
Philippe-François-Joseph Le Bas- crime: bold, dutiful and outspoken against the conspirators.  Honest in his love of the patrie.  Devotion to the triumvir, Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just.  
  
Georges Auguste Couthon- crime: morality, _vertu_ , gentility and sense of justice.  Working tirelessly in the service of the People.  
  
Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just- crime: …  
  
But Maxime’s mind, let alone his heart, never permitted his thoughts to stray further than that beloved name.  He knew well enough how Antoine’s virtue incited every vice that his detractors possessed, how he roused in them both a possessive desire never to part from him and at the same time to destroy him utterly.

  
  
*

  
  
On 19 Messidor, Collot told the story of William Tell before the Jacobin Club, performing it with all the thunderous force, perhaps, with which he once performed in the theater.  His voice welled from the broad depths of his chest, resounding from the walls, rolling across the gathered citizens.  He spoke of the tyrannical villain Albrecht Gessler, who hung his hat from a pole and forced people to bow before it in deference.  With tremulous, wet-eyed passion, Collot told of Tell’s defiance, of the terror and despair he felt when Gessler forced him to shoot the apple from his beloved son’s head.  And then, voice soaring upwards, he spoke of bravery, of the courage of resistance, of the assassination of Gessler that sparked rebellion.  
  
“Today, my friends, we are in dire need of another William Tell,” Collot cried, his gaze settling briefly upon Maxime’s.  “If we are to liberate France from its Gesslers.” 

 

*

  
  
From the beginning, the men of the clubs and the Convention acted like boys performing ancient battles, youths forging a manhood modeled on ancient myth.  These simple visions offered simple comforts: monstrous villains ranged against god-blessed heroes possessed of the purest virtue.  Such tales lacked neither death nor sorrow: good did not always triumph, and the lesson often lay as much in the courage of facing a cruel tyrant or accepting death, as it did in triumphing over either.  Here is your path if you would be a man, such tales said: take up battle and slay the villain.  If you cannot slay him, if you would not be craven, die honourably ‘neath the blades he wields against you; otherwise, be driven forth into the wilderness to die a coward or a madman.  They had all been raised upon such stories, and thus every man amongst them sought to prove himself the heir of antiquity, as Telemachus sought to prove his manhood by stringing mighty Odysseus’ bow.  
  
Maxime had no such tales to tell, no simple Gesslers to face.  What could he liken this moment to but Heracles’ battle with the Lernaean Hydra?  Mirabeau, Lafayette, Brissot, Hébert, Danton: all the old idols had fallen, yet now their enemies were innumerable, as though shattering such figureheads only birthed more conspirators.  As honest as Maxime accounted most of the Jacobins- as sure as he was that their errors stemmed more from being grievously misled than from inherent iniquity- he might as easily have asked them to battle a morning’s mist, or take up swords and charge the Seine.  What tale could he weave, after all, that would resonate in their hearts?  Could those who had already succumbed to the corrupting, fatal influence of _amour-propre_ , who wanted no more from life than to smash the ancient models and replace them with their own image, be asked to take up arms against a foe whose defeat offered no fame?  Could a man who turned his eyes more oft’ to others’ faces, scorning to judge his own reflection, engage in private, secret battle with his soul?  
  
Maxime could only speak to them, then, from the honesty of his heart.  For all that Collot’s lethal influence was spreading, Maxime knew that he alone retained the support of the Jacobin Club.  He stood at its rostrum with a sensation akin to Icarus plummeting from the very sky that had embraced him, flapping his broken wings in the gasped moments before he plunged into the grasping sea.  David sat amongst the audience, hunched forward attentively, his face made grim by the play of light and shadow upon his stark features.  Maurice, seated further along the same bench, looked careworn and frail.  In front of them, Philippe, reclined amiably against Bonbon’s sturdier frame, his eyes shadowed with exhaustion and red as though he had recently been weeping.  Conversely, Bonbon smiled fondly at those around him, impervious to any sense of disaster, perhaps still smitten with that young Corsican he had befriended and daydreaming of future missions.  Georges sat in his chair at the very front, his expression one of serene encouragement, while Antoine sat by his elbow.  The younger man’s gaze held Maxime’s, even as he bent to murmur something in Georges’ ear that made the other man laugh and press his hand.  Seeing these dear allies, Maxime felt some of his old strength return.  With his friends a beacon in this sea of masks, Maxime could speak, unwavering as they were unwavering.  
  
“There are few generous men who love virtue for itself and ardently desire the happiness of the people,” Maxime began.    
  
He paused, allowing the weight of his words to fall as he peered into the shadows.  Such expressions they wore, these gathered patriots!  Some looked to their hands or their feet, some to their friends.  Others, as though to declare their own virtuosity, looked with pitying judgment towards their neighbours.  Few apart from Maxime’s own dear friends seemed content to accord themselves neither honour nor denunciation.  He cleared his throat of the mingled pride and despair that choked it.  
  
“Of all the decrees which have saved the Republic,” he said,  “the only ones to preserve it from corruption and free the people from tyranny are those which make honesty and virtue the order of the day.  There is one remedy alone for all our ills: obedience to the laws of nature, laws which intend every man to be just and to live the virtuous life that forms the foundation of worthy societies.  Such sentiment is written on the hearts of every patriot.  It is a touchstone by which they may recognise their friends, even amongst a mass of deceivers.”  
  
He spoke of men who fluctuated between being the impassioned support of liberty and shadowy, sullen observance.  He spoke of the platitudes and empty tirades with which they cudgeled their enemies, even as they ignored public morality or the happiness of fellow-citizens. Their views, he said, oscillated like a weather vane depending upon which perspective purchased most favour: now the rage of a Hanriot, then the softness of Danton.  Maxime spoke until his throat was raw and dry, until his eyes watered from peering so long into the shadows.  Though he intended that they should denounce one another if necessity arose, that they be watchful and wary of the tricks and ploys of men like Collot, he wanted still more that they should denounce their own hearts.  When at last he fell silent, his chest heaving from the force with which he had spoken, what he saw instead was their great and terrible arrogance: the certainty with which they faulted others, blind to how they themselves fed the great beast of the counter-revolution.  
  
Some hours later, in the privacy of his bedchamber, Maxime paced the boards as he wrung his hands.  
  
“I have not done enough,” he declared at last, forcing himself to look at Antoine.  “Never enough.”  
  
“Stop,” Antoine said, voice roughened by sleepless nights.  “You spoke well.  You have reminded them of certain, fundamental truths and can do no more.”    
  
Tired though Antoine himself must be, his shoulders remained unbowed.  As if to test their strength, Maxime placed his hands upon them; Antoine did not, would not, bend.  His hands sought the lapels of Antoine’s coat.  He bowed his head to his friend’s chest, and gripped him as a drowning man grips the rope thrown to his aid.    
  
“My friend,” he sighed, as Antoine’s arms closed ‘round him.  “My dearest friend.  I am so very, very tired.”

 

*

  
  
“Saint-André came to see me,” Antoine said quietly.  “He spoke of storms and portents.”  
  
Maxime glanced up from his notebook, where he had been composing some notes on Fouché to present at the Club.  Antoine stood at the window, gazing into the yard below.  Within the short time since he had returned to Paris, the younger man’s face had lost its martial ruddiness and turned paler than ever.  He was Endymion reborn, Maxime thought.  Surely his elegant hands gripped the embrasure only so he might resist the Moon’s summons to eternal sleep.    
  
“And you?” Maxime asked.  “How did you answer?”  
  
“I thanked him and said I would keep my own council.”  
  
Antoine’s gaze was fixed somewhere beyond the windowpane.  Maxime waited; waited so long that he began to think of turning back to his books.  
  
“This absence you have forced upon yourself grows wide,” Antoine said at last. “It forms a gulf between you and the Convention.  Between you and the Committee.  Georges’ attempts to close it bring him nothing but pity and scorn.  Everyone calls him your acolyte.  Some openly ask whether he believes your hands may heal him, as Jesus healed the crippled man at Capernaum.”  
  
Maxime flinched as the harsh ugliness of other men’s words dripped from the perfect curves of Antoine’s lips.  
  
“For my part,” the younger man continued.  “It is our ideals I press for.  I do not compromise or plead for you, but every word from my mouth, every action I take, is guided by all we have spoken and dreamed of.  There is- there can be- no separation: _l’homme, le nation, la République._   You.  I.”  
  
“What does the Committee think of this?”  
  
“I am, I suppose, useful in their eyes.  Wanted,” Antoine murmured.  “You are not.  Nor is Georges.”  
  
He spoke as though continuing a discussion he had long held with himself.  Antoine released the windowsill to skirt the shape of his breath upon the glass with his finger.  He turned to face Maxime, the sorrow in his eyes enough to impel Maxime to his feet.  He would have embraced his friend, had Antoine not raised a hand to forestall him.  
  
“You cannot know how I am beset: in the streets, in the corridors, upon the steps, within the Committee,” Antoine said.  “You were right to speak of false tongues and feigned sentiment, but do you not know, Maxime, how they also speak of storms?  Of ships lost upon the wild ocean?  How they call a man Leander and say they will spare him from the waves?  Or Icarus, whom they will catch in his fall?  Or Achilles, whom they will shield from Paris’ fatal arrow?”  
  
“Antoine,” Maxime said softly.  “I have known…we have known…the depths of this conspiracy for some time.”  
  
“Yet they are careful not to commit crimes for which they might be denounced.  If they speak, it is privately, and in the Committee there are only these…approaches.”  Antoine’s features twisted the grace of his features into those of a god recoiling from some mortal’s impure embrace.  His voice trembled.  “You, Maxime, called me by these same names.  You were the first.  You taught me their sweetness as you once taught me the meaning of birdsong at dawn.  You are every line I have written on friendship.  You are the book from which I took my readings.”  
  
Maxime felt pressure growing within his breast, as though Antoine held his heart in his hand and tightened his grip with every word.  
  
“What answer did you give their entreaties?” Maxime asked.  
  
“That I am not Leander, seduced, or a disobedient boy with broken wings.  That Achilles was many things, but no coward or faithless friend.  That if I were like Achilles at all, it would be in intensity of love and despair and rage, not in making peace with the Agamemnon’s of France.”  
  
Only then did Antoine step forward, or Maxime did.  Perhaps they moved as one, he thought, as their hands closed upon one another’s elbows.  Perhaps they always had.  Something, Maxime supposed, in their very souls…  
  
“You must return, Maxime,” Antoine said.  “Your absence allows calumny and slander to grow and spread.  Falsehood is everywhere.”  
  
“The Convention, much less the people it represents…”  
  
“The general will is never wrong, but it can be misled: you know that.  You also know I am of a more classical bent: if I have come to love Rousseau, it is more in the nature of loving you than he.  On this matter, however, he wrote wisely.  Will you ignore his lessons now, of all times?”  
  
There was something youthful in that tender, breaking voice.  Maxime traced his thumbs along the lines, fine and pale as spiderweb, that etched the corners of those boyishly large eyes.  He reassured himself of their years together from this subtle, secret writing upon Antoine’s skin.  Maxime rose onto his toes and kissed those cheeks, that supple mouth, though Antoine would bow neither to him.  How could Maxime help but laugh at this stubbornness, this sweetest of defiences, as the whole world crumbled around them?  
  
“My conscience,” Maxime said, “is pure, and I am calm.”  
  
“Robespierre: the Roman, the Stoic.”  A kiss, then, like an apology. Fine-boned fingers, light as bird’s feathers, brushed Maxime’s jaw.  Antoine pulled back to meet his gaze, steady and implacable.  “It is well.  A man should not fear death when posterity awaits.  But the Republic…”  
  
“Is not one man.”  
  
“No, or you would be the dictator they claim.  But what will She become?  An actress?  A harlot?  Stripped of dignity and mocked by the same men who defiled Her?  Forced to birth oppressions when she might have nursed every freedom we dreamed of?”  Antoine shook his head.  “Maxime, it is not one man, but do you suppose they will spare Payan?  Dumas?  Will they allow Georges to live?”  
  
Maxime hesitated.  There was a tenderness between Georges and Antoine that did not encompass him: a loving, unnameable intimacy that never encroached upon their own relations.  On Georges’ part at least, an admiration for a form that suggested the purity of masculine beauty found in Girodet or David.  An admiration that had in it something of the fatal romance, but lacked the burning desire to be joined, to touch and consummate and find completion: more a desire of the mystic for the Beloved.  
  
“He speaks of you,” Maxime said.  “He says you are like a rose: exquisite, hardier than you look, defended by any number of thorns.  And yet, as men will pluck a rose to stick in their buttonhole, they would have you beside them to ornament their cause.  No one would begrudge you life, Antoine.  Or the years you might still serve the _patrie_.  Your ideals…”  
  
“Am I, now, thrown in amongst your enemies?  Do you feed me to beasts?”  
  
“It is more important to serve the nation than...”  
  
“One cannot govern without friends, Maxime, and a plucked rose is swift to wither.  It is not made to be kept, or to live apart from what sustains it.”  
  
“What is it, Antoine, that sustains you?”  
  
“The nation.  The people.  Our ideals.  You.  All are inseparable to me.  As a rose is simply the alchemy of sunlight and water, soil and seed.”  
  
Had Antoine become the lawyer his mother intended him to be, Maxime thought, he might have been unstoppable.  As it was, the simple, unadorned profundity of the argument left Maxime silent, chastened.  
  
“I will die, and gladly so, if a time comes when I am deprived of the ability to benefit the people,” Antoine murmured, kissing Maxime with such tenderness and certainty that it was as though their years were numbered in millenia and not meager years.  “Do not, my friend, allow your absence to hasten the blade.”

 

*

  
In the Club, Maxime spoke of Fouché’s crimes at Ville-Affranchie.  He told every foul detail of the mutilation and murder that had ensued during his mission, of his obscene parodies of faith and religious rites.  He spoke of the terror Fouché employed to silence patriots.  In the end, the Club, if not yet the Tribunal, condemned him and drove him forth.  
  
Of Collot, he said nothing.  Not yet.  
  
_We shall see who the real Gesslers of France are,_ Maxime thought, _when they are deprived of their henchmen._

 

**Thermidor**

 

They had both come- Antoine, Georges- like emissaries from a distant land, entreating him within the little room where Maxime greeted all his visitors.  
  
“I ask nothing of you.  Nothing,” Antoine said, his voice low and urgent, “but this: return to the Committee.”  
  
“Antoine…”  
  
“You are wandering, alone.  I have made a path forward, even if it is with Barère.  We have made them see reason on the implementation of the Ventôse Decrees.”  
  
“You have friends on both Committees who tender you,” Georges interrupted, staying the flow of Antoine’s words with a motion of his hand.  “You have us, and Le Bas and David besides.  I have no love for Barère either, Maxime, but he is an opportunist: in no way can he be compared to such tigers as Billaud and Collot.  He means you no harm.”

 _Perhaps not,_ Maxime thought, _but then for what purpose, other than malice, would Vadier or Collot assent to furthering decrees that have languished for months?_

“I esteem you both as patriots and as men," he said at last, meaning every word of it.  "Never have you given me cause to doubt your virtue, or the purity of your hearts.  I will go, since you ask it.”  
  
And so saying, he clasped their hands.  Georges’: loose skinned and thin, like a glove over bare bone.  Antoine’s: firm, muscular, still rough from gripping reins and balancing quills.  Warm.  Alive.  The both of them a tether for his very soul.    

  
  
*

  
  
Despite the late hour, the heat of the mid-afternoon sun lingered, rendering the meeting room of the Committee of Public Safety stagnant.  The air was thick with mingled breath, heavy with the scent of sweat and unwashed clothes.  The two Committees stood ‘round the table as predator and prey will drink from the same river.  The only sound was the creak of the windows being forced open, the protest of heat-swollen wood.  
  
During the period in which Maxime absented himself from the Committee, it seemed nothing had changed.  The room remained undisturbed, as though no time had passed.  The table with its green cloth, its scatter of glasses and bottles, the fall of light and shadow: all seemed desperately familiar.  The only variance was the silence between them all, crisp as a winter morning.  A silence made the more disconcerting by both Committees being present.    
  
“I think I express the feelings of both Committees, Robespierre, when I say we welcome your return,” Barère said at last, his unctuous voice spreading like oil spilled over water.  
  
“Yes, we feared the depths of your ailment might keep you from us even longer,” Billaud said.  His voice possessed an unfamiliar lightness somehow more ominous than the habitual rumble of his anger.  “It is a relief to have you back.”  
  
Billaud’s broad hand descended on Maxime’s shoulder: a weight to bear them down together.  It was a trap seen too late, sprung too fast.  Vadier, sallow, lined less by wisdom than by the multiplication of his vices, slipped into the seat on Maxime’s left.  Amar and Carnot were swift to take the places on either side of Georges, wedging him into a space so narrow as to render his chair immovable until they deigned to stand.  Antoine already sat beside Barère, and now Collot took the chair to his left.  Only Le Bas and David found seats together, an island separated not only from Maxime, but Georges and Antoine.  They had baited the hook well, if not entirely concealed it.  Georges looked pained at this affront to his gentle nature, David confused.  Le Bas’ hands trembled where they rested upon the table as he leaned forward to catch Antoine’s eye.  Antoine’s gaze met Maxime’s, instead, steady and resolved in spite of all.  
  
_You have me,_ that gaze said, _and I you._   But in that moment, Maxime’s only thought was to expose the truth.  
  
“It has been a little over four months," he began, "since Citizen Saint-Just delivered the Ventôse Decrees.  Decrees whose policies were allowed to stagnate through ill-feeling.  An excessive moderation that gave more succour to exiles and counterrevolutionaries than to impoverished patriots.”  
  
As a young man in Arras, Maxime had composed copious notes on every case.  His defenses were meticulously planned, the best lines and arguments circled, all else struck out.  He would stand before a mirror, in those early days, to test his voice: that quality bequeathed to him by nature, yet subject in certain small ways to the force of his will.  As he spoke now, Maxime listened to himself with that same critical ear: he smoothed the tremor from his words and forced his voice lower, restrained himself to the facts before him.  
  
“And now you are happy to proceed.  Now you say how well it is to prepare cases for the Tribunal rather than have calumniated patriots languishing in cells.”  He paused long enough to quell the rising tide of his voice.  “As though I do not know perfectly well how the laws of Prairial have been turned, by certain agents of conspiracy…”  
  
“Agents,” Vadier huffed, his shoulder butting against Maxime’s.    
  
He would not recoil, would not give his enemies the satisfaction of muttering amongst themselves: Robespierre the unmanly, Robespierre the untouched, Robespierre the cowardly and inhuman.  He longed to adjust his cuffs, to occupy his fingertips with something other than the temptation to clench at the tablecloth, but satisfied neither desire.  He let his gaze slip sideways towards Vadier.  
  
“Agents.  Do you suppose it matters whether one is paid by Pitt, or a willing servant of the counterrevolution?  No.  If a man’s deeds and words align him with the forces of tyranny, then he is an agent of it.”  
  
Amar leaned forward.  “What are you implying, Robespierre?”  
  
“Do you suppose I have not noticed the steady increase in suspects?  The executions?  How you have made a travesty of justice by punishing the simple and misled before the villainous?”  
  
“Oh,” said Lindet, throwing himself back in his chair.  “Now he lacks a taste for blood.”  
  
He turned to look at him. Lindet, from whom the shadow of mourning never lifted, who startled back from whatever he conjured in Maxime’s gaze.  
  
“You speak thus,” Maxime said quietly.  “Yet sit contentedly at this table, sharing wine with mercenaries and butchers.”  
  
“Be still, all of you.  Did we not agree to this sitting?  Are we not all weary of these battles amongst good patriots?  Come, let’s have peace among us for one evening at least.”  
  
The rough grain of Billaud’s voice was worn smooth tonight.  Maxime looked up at him: at the mouth still fixed in its grim line, at eyes that met his own with a thoughtful stillness that Maxime had never seen before.  It was not, he reflected, what one might call calculating, yet there was something in Billaud’s calm that made him uneasy.  
  
“We did not invite your return, Robespierre, to wage war.  No, we would be men of peace.”  
  
“Peace?” Maxime asked.  
  
Antoine leaned forward, his arms folded before him on the table like a schoolboy.  He fixed his gaze on Billaud.  
  
“Peace is a tyrant’s word,” he said.  “It is fit for slaves: as sugar lulls a teething child, talk of peace lulls a people unaccustomed to freedom.  Say justice.  There is only just and unjust in this world: the latter must not come to govern, the former must be allowed to govern us.”  
  
“We are your friends,” Billaud said at last, with a great and billowing sigh: a terrific performance of sorrow.  His hand, almost as large and rough as Danton’s, smothered Maxime’s, parted his fingers to force the thickness of his own between them and curl them down together.  “We have always gone forward together.”  
  
Across the green table, Maxime met Antoine’s eyes.  Saw in them a confirmation of what he already knew: they had no friends here but each other.  These laws the Committee suddenly saw fit to enact, the report upon them that they offered now for Antoine to deliver in the Convention, were a seduction.  As a lascivious man might offer trinkets to some pretty girl, the Committees would seek to purchase Antoine's clever mind and ringing voice, those beguiling eyes, that marble form, his reputation for heroism and victory.  This meeting, then, was not- perhaps had never been- a reconciliation with Maxime, but rather an overture to Antoine.  
  
In that moment, the whole plot unfolded before Maxime.  
  
Even so, when the moment came, he signed the new decree they put before him.  Then he returned home to the Duplay’s, and to his desk.  He began to write.

  
  
*

  
  
Maxime admitted no visitors.  Though he heard Antoine’s steps upon the outer staircase and his tap upon the door, he resisted the longing to answer.  Even when he heard the familiar richness of Antoine’s voice cajoling Maurice down below, when the landlord first asked Maxime to see the younger man and then attempted to intercede on Antoine’s behalf, Maxime refused to see him.  He gave no reason for this abrupt cessation, as it must have seemed, of their friendship.  Not because there was none, but because he could not trust his own voice to speak the truth: that he was composing a speech that would lay bare all his heart, that would either free him of censure or condemn him to death.  That he would not, in writing it, condemn his friends to fall with him or feed the rumours that made of them no more than puppets at best, triumvirs at worse.  He could offer no more than this: the choice of standing by him through this tribulation, or of dissolving their bonds and continuing ever forward.  
  
“I will see no one,” Maxime said, firm, loud enough that his voice might even carry to Antoine as he waited.  
  
He closed the door then, listening to Maurice’s retreating, defeated steps.  Stood with his hand upon it, his fingers aching to fling the door open again; with his forehead bent against the wood as if to pass through so solid a barrier.  And then, as Antoine's departing steps echoed upon the cobblestones below, he returned to work.  
  
The letter arrived on the morning of 7 Thermidor, delivered by Éléonore’s trembling hand and written with greater irreverence than ever.  Penned in such haste that the letters listed and ran together.  
  
_My dear friend,_  
  
_What can this absence mean?  Why is there silence between us, and a door barred to my most sincere entreaty?_  
  
_I am pure.  Do you doubt me?  Some misgiving tells me you must._

 _Some poisonous calumny has been poured into your ear._ _Give me your rage then, Maxime.  Let me burn with your denunciation.  Strike me with every word.  All else is intolerable._  
  
_I remain the Republic’s- and your-_  
  
_Saint-Just_  
  
Did the words blur from the ache in Maxime’s eyes?  Did the exhaustion of the hours spent in writing, in composing this great- and perhaps final- speech overcome him then?  Did some dark and unacknowledged terror seize him?  Maxime forbid it.  Held instead to the remaining courage in his heart.  To this final act of love: for the Republic, for his friends.  For Antoine.  
  
“Burn the letter, Éléonore,” Maxime said, his voice absolutely steady.  His hand did not even tremble when he returned the missive to her, though his fingers lingered upon the paper.  “As soon as possible.”  
  
“I do not understand you, Maxime,” she said, such sorrow written on her lips that it was as though she were become Antoine’s looking glass.  “It is by Saint-Just’s hand.  If you could see his face, you would not affect such coldness.”  
  
“That is why I do not see him, little bird.”  
  
“But it is Antoine!  My God, what can he possibly have done…?”  
  
“Nothing, my dear,” Maxime said at last, gathering Éléonore into the circle of his arms.  She did not weep, though her eyes were wet and her cheeks ruddy.  “He is innocent.  You are both so terribly, terribly innocent.”

*

  
Perhaps, Maxime supposed, this _was_ his final evening, and so he spent it walking with Éléonore along the Champs-Élysées, Brount dancing upon the end of his leash.  At last, Maxime did not think of the pages of spilled ink waiting upon his desk.  If he was watched with the burning eyes of tyranny, if calumny hissed like venom from the mouths of passers-by, he paid it no mind.  The sky, suspended above them like a great blue scrim, painted in long lashings of wispy silver cloud, streaked pink and orange and the brilliant red of a fresh wound.  
  
“How beautiful,” he said, more to himself than to Éléonore, “this calm finality of the day.”  
  
“Do you suppose, Maxime, that it will be a good ‘morrow?”  
  
Her question made him recall another moment, years past: he, Camille and Danton in the Palais-Royal, lounging on the grass beneath such as sun as this.  _It is a sign,_ Camille had claimed, and yet that sign abandoned them both: Danton and Camille, after all, died under much the same light they once treasured.  Maxime recalled, too, a rare and precious evening when he embraced Antoine under a sky such as this: awed by how it turned his friend’s skin to gold, shivering at the red stripe that spilled through the window, across Antoine’s throat and then, at last, shivering instead from the grace of Antoine’s every touch, the soft of his lips.  Perhaps, Maxime thought, such signs and portents were all meaningless.  Or perhaps, instead, it was not for Man to know the mind of that Supreme Being who governed them all: only He saw what was good in both love and death, in fear and in hope.  Tomorrow, after all, Maxime would ascend the tribune.  He would speak his whole heart, and they would hear him.  He would die, or not, but his conscience would be pure, calm and he would remain inviolate.  Such a fate could be called goodness, after all, even if it were cruel.    
  
“It foretells a good morning,” he said gently, because he could not say what was in his heart: _be brave, Éléonore, and live on_.    
  
“I understand now,” she said, a slight tremble in her voice.  “You mean to die.”  
  
Strange, perhaps, but in that moment Maxime smiled as he had not for some time.  He pressed her hand while knowing, even as he did, that she would feel the farewell in it.  
  
“I mean to live,” Maxime said, looking up at the sky.  “If only in posterity.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Something of a side note: this chapter was an absolute challenge to write, until the disaster of the Australian election took place which...provided great inspiration for not only the sense of despair, but Robespierre's anger at the influence of _amour-propre_ on his fellow representatives and Committee members.
> 
> In addition to my usual sources, which I've listed in the series notes for _Les Saisons_. This chapter also draws heavily on some of the language Robespierre used in his speech on 8 Thermidor. There is also a lot more to that time period than what I have presented here, and that is something that I would like to approach in later work, however I had to consider the 'purpose' of this particular story and thus make decisions about what I would/wouldn't go into. 
> 
>  
> 
> **General Notes:**
> 
>  
> 
> _Chant de guerre:_ Lit. 'war song'.
> 
> _Robespierre's 'report' in the Jacobin Club:_ The remarks Robespierre makes in this section, following more or less on the heels of Collot's 'William Tell' speech, are quotes from his actual remarks that night.
> 
>  _Saint-André's visit to Saint-Just:_ In a post-Thermidor source, Saint-André claims to have gone to Saint-Just and spoken openly (and, by implication, somewhat reciprocally) with Saint-Just. The claim itself seems suspicious, as everything from that time tends to, however I generally treat these documents as having a small grain of truth to them.
> 
> _The work of Girodet:_ Robespierre is referring to Anne-Louis Girodet, whose artwork- perhaps moreso than David's- is homoerotic to say the least. I could perhaps write an essay on the extent to which Saint-Just's appearance maps to Neo-classical conceptions of male beauty, but I might save it for a fic.
> 
> _...the mystic for the Beloved:_ Robespierre is making a nod towards Sufism here, using the language that would have been common at the time. This is another matter that deserves a thesis, but suffice to say that it has spiritual implications that overlap with Platonic ideals, and therefore have a classically homosocial element to them.
> 
> _Pitt:_ William Pitt the Younger, a Tory statesman, features prominently in Robespierre's writing around this period and is central to the idea of the 'foreign plot' by which other nations would invade and seek to overthrow the Republic/install a new monarch.
> 
> _The Reconciliation Meeting:_ Did happen, and was the point at which- according to the text of Saint-Just's 9 Thermidor speech- Saint-Just (at least) fully realised that Billaud was playing a double game. I think it is reasonable, on the basis of what happened that night, to at least wonder whether the 'reconciliation' played more to Saint-Just's sentiment than to any desire to work with Robespierre. Here, at least, it ties in with other suggestions that Saint-Just's life might have been preserved _if_ he had aligned himself during Messidor/Thermidor with Billaud or Collot, but that is obviously a matter of conjecture. 
> 
> _Robespierre's final walk:_ Probably more a matter of legend, but I wanted to include it here. One thing I have changed in this is the idea that Robespierre honestly believed he would be successful on the 8th. The reason for the change is more grounded in philosophy than pure fact. However: in Stoicism in particular, there is an idea that since you cannot control fate (in the form of others), you should simply accept what is and move on through life accordingly. Thus, I think Robespierre's reported confidence may have been less literal than it's usually interpreted as. You could assume that he really didn't know what the likely outcome was, however the 8 Thermidor speech makes it reasonably clear that he was fully aware of the risks he faced. Personally, I interpret it more as a declaration of moral fortitude: his faith would either be proven right, or he would fall, and he had accepted both alternatives.


	2. The Unhappiest Man Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the wake of the events of the past few months, Robespierre returns to the Convention and faces them to lay bare the struggle in his heart and save the course of the Revolution. In doing so, both he and Saint-Just must make a final choice of their own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After spending a delirious 24 hours in the grips of illness, this chapter finally reached posting stage! I do hope, however, that I've managed to catch any silly little typos here and there.
> 
> I should note, this chapter is explicit towards the end.
> 
> Also, please feel free to check out the [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0s6ZEfypCPsC3IKsVmtNLZ?si=kYkTaiRlT367sn142XFoHQ)for this part of _Les Saisons_.

The previous night’s red sky had foretold the truth, heralding the perfect summer morning of the eighth of Thermidor.  The dawn sky over the Champs-Élysées turned silver-pale before the rising sun deepened it to so radiant a blue it must surely provoke David’s jealousy.  Was even the sun richer this morning?  It seemed so to Maxime: its colour not cheap as gold, but rather the warm yellow of a freshly cracked egg.  Oh, beauty!  Oh the privilege to witness it!  Was it not wondrous?  
  
Brount began to fret upon the end of his leash, frustrated, perhaps, by Maxime’s stillness.  He pulled, whining and dancing to and fro.  Poor beast: he could not possibly know the significance of this rare morning walk they shared.    
  
To be so close to nature must be a joyous thing, Maxime thought.  Brount knew only simple terrors: his dinner served late, an ominous roll of building thunder, pains immediate, unknown and merely borne.  What beast but man feels despair, the crushing weight of disappointment?  What beast but man knotted love and loss so close together?  Felt the spectacular dizziness of standing above one’s own grave and seeing the depth of the fall?  The simple goodness of a dog’s existence acknowledged neither the lingering beauty of the dawn, nor the choking terror that settled like a fist in a man’s throat.  
  
The moment Maxime crouched down, Brount bounded into his arms with force enough to topple him back onto the earth.  He laughed and tugged the dog’s ears, wrestled him like a mere puppy.  A moment later he lay back, blinking fast enough for the tears threatening to spill down his cheeks to instead cling to his lashes, cold with the earliness of the morning.  
  
“There you go, old friend,” Maxime laughed.  “You have toppled a dictator.”

 

*

 

“My reason, not my heart, is on the point of distrusting this virtuous Republic.”  
  
In the stillness of his chamber, Maxime repeated the words like a psalm.  His tongue slotted each word into place, as his mother’s slim fingers once ticked over rosary beads.  No matter where he moved in the room- indeed, even with his back turned- the sheaf of papers comprising his speech appeared in the corner of his eye, like a speck of dust he could not rid himself of.  
  
_My reason, not my heart._  
  
Before the barber arrived, Éléonore brought Maxime’s coffee in one of Madame Duplay’s best cups.  Her large, thoughtful eyes were rimmed pink.  She placed an orange into his palm, its scent so fresh and vigorous it seemed freshly plucked from the tree.  Her fingers traced his as she departed.  Maxime looked down.  The fruit in his hand was almost the same shade as a setting sun: its thick skin possessed a soft, leathery grain he had never noticed before.  He peeled it with infinite care, so as not to pierce the flesh in reckless haste.  His fingers came away redolent with its scent. He savoured each segment, from the first burst of juice to the seeds he rolled upon his tongue.  Maxime recalled a moment, long ago now: Antoine on top of him, heavy and hard with the morning, his tongue entering Maxime’s mouth in a slow, deep slide.  _‘You have made me love the taste of oranges.  Maxime, mon cher ami, mon cher amour, open, yes, I’ll devour you…yes, all of you, only give me your mouth._ ’  
  
He would not think of Antoine.  Not now.      
  
_My reason, not my heart, is on the point_ … Maxime recited.  _My reason, not my heart._  
  
As ever, the barber attended him promptly at eight.  Maxime willingly submitted to the ritual: the cloth ‘round his shoulders, the cloud of powder, the vague sweetness of its scent mingling with the lingering sharpness of citrus.  _When will you leave off with this old-fashioned nonsense?_ David once teased. _Antoine no longer powders his curls, yet you persist with having wigs?_   Maxime had said, laughing, _But Antoine is not going bald, my friend._   That memory, too, he set aside.  Today, though he had shaved recently, Maxime asked for the razor.  Lay back and gave his throat and tried not to think of another blade, thicker and heavier.  _How cold,_ he thought, _how cold and merciless the metal._  
  
Toilette complete, Maxime finished his preparations.  Lest anyone mistake his height and the gentle symmetry of his face for weakness, he adjusted his collar and his cravat, his coat, until the mirror reflected a man of stark and imposing lines.  He gathered his papers and tested their weight on his palms, shuffled them into his briefcase and made his way downstairs.  
  
The entire Duplay household seemed to have gathered, waiting.  Victoire paused in her reading, heedless of the pages she lost in watching him.  Éléonore ceased her needlework, her hands white-knuckled where she gripped the pillowcase she mended; she did not look at him.  Madame Duplay hovered in the kitchen doorway, her hands lost in the twisted folds of her apron.    
  
Maurice, gentle face creased with worry, met Maxime at the door.  Set a heavy, workman’s hand upon his shoulder and pressed it with such exceptional, paternal kindness that Maxime’s smile felt but a poor counterfeit.  Perhaps he saw the misgiving that Maxime felt in the very depths of his soul, that must have marked his face, that unbidden thought: _and the stain I will leave on your good name, the ruin I will bring your dear family that I treasure as my own?_    Perhaps that, or something in Maxime’s straining eyes, prompted Maurice to speak.  
  
“Never have I regretted your presence with us,” he said.  And then, following this gentle declaration with another, more solemn one, “Perhaps some will call you our benefactor, but you are a son in this house, a brother to Jacques and my dear girls, a cousin to Simon.”  
  
Maxime embraced him then, as he might have embraced his own father under different circumstances.  Then he passed through the door, to where Georges waited- gaunt, eyes bruised with exhaustion and hands clutching the arms of his chair as though someone meant to wrest him from it.  
  
“It is a good morning,” Georges said, “old friend.”

 

*

 

Gladiators, Maxime once read, lived but fleeting lives.  The crowds tired of applauding them, an Emperor forgot his favourite, one was pulled apart by beast or by man, another died from some infection.  If he died in these coming days, Maxime reflected, he would have outlived many such men: a gladiator within the Convention.  He carried the wounds in heart and soul: each passing moment strained and stretched these old scars as though to pull them wide again.  His absence, he thought, had healed these wounds too tight.  Now it must learn to accommodate his will again, as wounded muscle must relearn its purpose to grow forceful again.  
  
Maxime sat above this arena, spectator and performer all at once.  He wondered, as the session opened, whether those ancient slaves felt thus.  Had they stood waiting, watching the _pompa_ ‘til they were called to follow in its wake?  Had they carried, within their strong hearts, a secret terror of the combat to come, and within their muscular bellies this twisting, roiling pain?  Had they at times sought some face amongst the audience: a handsome youth, perhaps, full lips bitten to the blood and downy cheeks flushed?  They surely must have, Maxime thought, for with all their might they were still mere men.  Because he felt the same, here in his amphitheatre, with its solemn invocation of correspondence and standing items, its crowded galleries: here too was his pounding heart and aching stomach. Because when Antoine entered, flanked by Barère and Billaud, Maxime’s gaze immediately sought the reassurance of that face to strengthen his resolve.  
  
_Antoine again, in the Duplay’s salon, flushed with radiant excitement as he prepared for his first mission.  A heady aroma of cinnamon and sugar lingered on the air from the compote served for dessert.  The wine Mme Duplay served that night had been particularly sweet, and they had all, perhaps, drunk a little much of it.  Oh, how simple that room, and kind that gathering: warmed more by the heat of gentle affections and close-pressed bodies.  Philippe and Antoine stood by the fireplace, arms looped about each other’s waists, ruddy-cheeked with wine and song.  They rested their heads together, mahogany mingling with gold.  David, drunk more on lingering sorrow than wine, watched them both with an artist’s avarice for beauty, and perhaps a thread of something else besides.  His bubbling, grape-scented laughter, wafted like the breath of Bacchus over Maxime’s face:_ ‘Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, such handsome soldiers, oh mon Dieu, mon Dieu, mon Dieu…’  _Maxime laughed and patted the artist’s hand sympathetically, before being distracted by Antoine’s voice:_ ‘Does not Plutarch tell us of those brave pairs who entered into battle, one beside the other- as Herodotus would have it those _heniochoi_ and _parabatai_ \- and how such bonds of friendship served only to strengthen them, to make them braver and more formidable, even, than the Spartans they faced?’  _And Philippe, then, red to the roots of his sun-tinted hair:_ ‘be thou to me, Antoine, so good a friend’.  _And seized him, the pair exchanging a token of kisses, lip striking ear, striking cheek, striking corner of mouth as such boyish affections are wont to after wine a little too thick, too sweet, too much._   ‘All friendship is love,’ _Antoine declared, parting from him.  Something like an oath burned in his dark eyes, their very centre a black flame.  He said,_ ‘And all men fight hardest for that which they love best.  The bonds between all good men should be so strong.’  _Some months later, those words and thoughts returned, refined and sober in Antoine’s cramped rooms:_ ‘Men do not fight for dirt alone, they fight for what they love…there is strength in such feeling, not weakness, and we would do better not to fear it.’  _And oh! how sweetly they had come together then, in understanding as much as in body.  How the physical signs of Antoine’s pleasure- the knit brow, the shuddering limbs, the softly bitten lip- had in them signs of suffering._  
  
Assailed by memory, Maxime watched Antoine ascend the stairs to the empty bench below.  Barère went first and Billaud behind, as though to guard him.  As though he were their prisoner.  The entire time, a veritable eternity as soundless and still as Maxime both hoped and feared lay just before death, their gazes held.  Antoine’s eyes, Maxime thought: a well into whose depths any man, leaning too close, might plummet and drown.    
  
_You walk beside me,_ he wanted to say to the man sitting before him, head high, shoulders unyielding, _we spoke of friendship, eternal, immutable, and it is here this moment: you are my shield and my spear, you drive me to courage before fearsome enemies, it is the one portion of everything we have aimed for that is ours alone.  I speak for our nation and for you, because love of one reinforces the other.  Do you, of all people, not understand?  Rather than a disavowal of our most sincere bonds, do you not hear instead the echoes of Greece and Thebes?  You are released either to stand by me in such extremity, or to forge for yourself your own path._   But the time for such speech- time he had denied himself- had vanished.  Maxime heard his name.  Was he summoned, then?  Called to arms and the battle of ravenous beasts?  Maxime embraced his speech with one arm like a shield.  He reached for Antoine’s shoulder as other men would reach for their blade.  Allowed his hand to drop at the last instant.  Antoine bowed his head, inclined it slightly to the side so that the plane of his cheek showed more clearly.  
  
_You who so love myths and old tales: do not,_ Maxime thought, _turn ‘round._    
  
Never had the scant number of steps to the floor of the Convention seemed so interminable, though Maxime was sure he took them at his accustomed pace.  Nor had it ever been so silent.  It was no deference, this; no welcome.  Rather it was the silence held less before the call to battle than the attack from within shadows.  There must surely be some other noise, Maxime supposed: some stirring of breath, some cough or clearing of a throat, but Maxime heard only the heavy fall of his own steps as he mounted the tribune.  How loud, then, seemed the breath he gathered in this great space: akin to the roar and whistle of some vicious winter wind.  
  
“Citizens,” Maxime said.  He paused, that beloved word was too thick in his throat, too painful to speak around.  “Citizens, others draw flattering pictures to you; I come, rather, to speak of helpful truths.  I come not to carry out the ridiculous terrors spread by perfidity, but to smother- if it is possible- the flames of dissension with the force of honesty.”  
  
Did he hear laughter?  The whispering of tongues already purchased by the forces of counter-revolution, poisoned by atheism and deceit?  Maxime paid no heed.  He spoke neither for them, or to them, but rather to those deputies that he must believe to be good and sound in judgment.  To those the Revolution depended upon, as a nursing child depends upon mother’s milk to grow strong and whole.  As he had written, so he now thought, even as he pressed onward: that sensible and pure souls must share this profound horror of tyranny, this compassionate zeal to defend the oppressed, this sacred love of the patrie which was also a sublime love of all humanity.  The rest were lost: deprived even of a beast’s simple soul, so that they questioned its very existence just as men who have never known hunger might question the existence of starvation.  Thus Maxime must plead his case before them, as one might plead before judges who are a mix of the corrupt and the lawful.  Perhaps the most terrible of all truths was this: how easy it was for corruption to spread, for the bad to pollute the good as the first small speck of rot may destroy an entire vineyard.  
  
“I only know two parties: the one of good and the one of bad citizens.”  
  
More murmurs at that, louder this time.  Maxime gathered all the breath his lungs could hold.  He steadied himself as a man braces against the gale threatening to drive him backwards.  
  
“I know that patriotism is not an affair of the faction, but an affair of the heart.  That it consists neither in insolence, nor in a brief passion which respects neither principles, nor common sense, no morals; even less in the devotion to the interests of a faction.  With a heart withered by the experience of so many betrayals, I believe in the necessity of appealing predominantly to honesty and generous feeling that we may succour the Republic.”    
  
Maxime paused, his gaze momentarily fixed upon the pages before him, though at times he felt he might recite the entirety by heart.  In the waiting quiet, he believed he heard even the rush of blood in his veins, louder than his heaving breaths, louder than his pounding heart.  His hands clenched ‘round the edges of the lectern, the wood gouging the backs of his fingers.  That sharp pain returned him to his cause.  
  
“I think, that everywhere one meets a good man, wheresoever he sits,” Maxime said, adjusting his glasses to sweep the gathered representatives with a gaze that settled last upon Antoine’s rapt face, “it is necessary to take him by the hand and to press him against one’s heart.”  
  
The flow of Maxime’s words came easier then, stoked by his friend’s attentive gaze, by the way he leaned forward now in his seat as though to savour every word: it was a strange reversal of that first day that Antoine rose and, in clear and ringing tones, demanded the trial of Louis Capet.  Then it had been Maxime who clung to the edge of his seat, who leaned into every line, who felt every word fall upon him like a life-giving rain on parched earth.  Now, Antoine’s attentiveness, as much as the truths he spoke, drove Maxime onward.  He heard at last the animation in his voice, how life and love filled it again as it had not in many months.  Speaking thus of tyranny and injustice, of how even the those honest representatives were now punished, he found himself brought ‘round again to the very beginning of their days.  Reminded of his purpose, he followed it as a man might follow a beacon to the end of a dark and winding path.  Even as he spoke, he wondered: was this not all that Antoine intended?  Was this not, in what might be their end, the realisation of their every shared ideal?  This tender thought tightened Maxime’s chest.  His voice trembled not with fear or anger, but with the profundity of this great love.  
  
“Which tyranny is more odious than the one who punished the people in the person of its defenders?” he demanded.  “Because the freest thing to exist in the world, even under the reign of despotism, is it not friendship?  But you, who make a crime out of it to us, are you jealous of it?  No, you only take the gold and the perishable goods which the tyrants hands out to those who serve them!”  
  
Here, then, was Maxime’s entire heart spilled out before them: all of its most secret chambers bared and opened to those who would know it, its contents poured forth to fill the Convention.  Here too his lungs: strained with the effort of speech, every breath guttering with the joy and agony of speaking aloud that which he had long held close, enclosed within himself as the stone hides within the peach and is laid bare only by being devoured.  Could the dictatorship of which he was accused flourish even in his absence, he demanded?  No!  Had the nation been bettered for him having seemed to have withdrawn from its service?  This neither!  Had he not abandoned his role in the Committee not because he no longer loved the patrie, nor yet because his quality as a man and a French citizen lacked importance, but because he served only his own reason and the nation?  Because to be a member of the Committee was to be impotent in doing what was good, in stopping the evils they were beset by?  
  
“My life?” he cried, shaking with the force of his words as a man near death, pouring out his life’s blood, trembles with the chill that sets upon him.  “I would abandon it without regret!  I have the experience of the past, and see the future before us.  Which friend of the patrie can want to survive the moment where he is no longer allowed to serve it and defend oppressed innocence?  Why remain in an order of things where intrigue eternally triumphs over truth, where justice is a deceit, where the vilest passions and most ridiculous fears occupy in every heart the place of the sacred interests of humanity.  Why sustain the torture of seeing this horrible succession of traitors more or less veiling their hideous souls beneath the guise of virtue, and even of friendship, but all of which leave to posterity the trouble to decide which enemies of my country are the most cowardly and atrocious!”  
  
How loud their talk grew then, as wasps become enraged and ready to attack when a man kicks their nest.    
  
“I have seen in history all the defenders of liberty attacked by calumny, but their oppressors are also dead!  The good and the wicked both disappear from earth, but under different circumstances.”  Gripping the lectern, Maxime looked up into the galleries, into faces indistinct yet all turned towards him.  “French people, do not allow your enemies to dare depress your souls with the desolation of their idle doctrines.  No, Chaumette!”  His palm struck the wood, shaking the lectern.  “No, Fouché!”  Again, he struck, and this time a great wave of sound, a roar from within the body of the representatives, swallowed it.  “Death is no eternal sleep!  Citizens, efface from the tombs this maxim engraved by the sacrilegious hands which seek to throw a funeral veil on nature, which discourage oppressed innocence, which insult death itself.  Instead, engrave there: death is the beginning of immortality!”    
  
For a moment he could barely think, let alone hear, so deafening was the response.  His enemies roared and howled like captive beasts.  Amongst this fugue, Maxime caught only some few words: the cry of dictator and of tyrant, their laughter, a mockery of his virtue, his frailty.  Name the accused, they called, as though he had denounced anyone!  As though they did not all stand accused: for their inaction, for the tolerance of this atrocity, for allowing iniquity still to flourish.  As though Maxime did not also accuse himself, had never demanded of himself that he do more, or ask what he might have done better.  As though this speech did not possess within it some element of atonement.  If there were any consolation it was in the applause of his friends, in a woman’s cry from the gallery: ‘we are with you, Robespierre’ and those that echoed it.  It was enough.  It must be.  He pushed through, with each passing moment, each new sentence, feeling the ache in his throat, the exhaustion encroaching upon him.  And yet he held.  He held and would not yield.  
  
“If it is impossible to reclaim our principles without passing for an ambitious person, then I will conclude from this that principles themselves are proscribed and that tyranny reigns again.  But I will not conclude that I must remain silent about them; because what could one object to a man who is reasonable and who knows how to die for his country?”  And then, “I am made to combat crime, not to govern it,” he said.  “The time is not here where good men can serve their _patrie_ with impunity.  The defenders of liberty will only be outcasts, as long as the horde of rogues retains control.”  
  
It was done.  The realisation took some few moments to set in, as feeling is slow to return to a numbed limb.  The familiar pain in Maxime’s legs returned first, radiating outward from its source in blazing tendrils along his veins.  Though he still clutched the sides of the tribune, his hands trembled; he clutched tighter, stilling them.  Between the bracket of his arms lay the pages of his speech.  He stared at them, at a slew of words suddenly rendered foreign and unfamiliar.  They seemed to list, at first, and then to blur and swirl together like drops of dark paint mixed in white.  No!  No!  He would not be this.  He would show them no weakness.  Maxime lifted his head.  
  
The onslaught began.

 

*

 

Maxime’s habitual ailment overcame him in the corridor outside of the Convention: a rush of heat and blaze of white.  His mind buzzed with their words, a whirl of such violence and volume in accusation that there was no place for his own thoughts: Panis and Cambon, Billaud; Dumont who had once been his friend, who had supped at his table.  What had he said?  He could barely recall.  Cruel and thoughtless things: that he wanted no help, no friendship.  Reckless honesty: that if his speech were examined by the Committees, it would only be sent to those he accused.  Maxime reeled, swaying on his feet.  He found the warmth and solidity of Georges’s shoulder and gripped it like a man struggling for purchase upon a sheer cliff.

“I am sorry, my friend,” he said, collecting himself.

Georges waved the apology away.

“It is a novelty,” he said, “to be the one relied upon.  I should thank you for allowing me to be a man once more.”

“In my eyes you are never less.”

“You are not most men, Maxime.  It is your greatest strength, I think.”  And then, with the gentleness for which Georges was known, “And perhaps your greatest weakness.”

“You do me too much kindness, my friend, and always have.”

“Then allow me to do another: dine with Marie and I tonight, before the club.”

Maxime hesitated.  He imagined the intervening hours alone in his room, picking at the small plate of food that Éléonore would bring as she had hundreds of nights before.  Or perhaps, instead, he would join the Duplay’s at table: no laughter this evening, let alone Victoire’s sombre musings, none of the familiar banter between Éléonore and her parents.  Yet still, “No,” he said quietly. “No, thank you, but I am sure on the morrow I…”

Georges caught his arm before he could continue the thought.  “Do not be alone tonight, Maxime,” he said, with a shake of his head. “Nor too much amongst the sorrows of others.”

“You are a most fearsome general, and all your weapons but a most lethal kindness,” Maxime replied, with a laugh barely felt.  “Of course, I shall be delighted to join you.”

He turned, then, to leave.  Ignored the deputies who passed by, their stares, their mutterings, giving no more than a nod to those who sought to encourage or praise him.  A simple task, given how few they numbered.  Through doors left wide to admit a breath of evening breeze, another red sunset spilled.  Another herald of a bright day to come.

“Maxime!” Georges called.  “Will we not stay and wait upon Antoine?”

“No,” Maxime said, still studying the fall of light upon stone.  Seeking to divine from it, perhaps, some message, though he knew not what he hoped for.  “Antoine will find his own way.”

“I cannot say whether you doubt him, or seek to protect him, but may I say as a man your senior…”

“By two years.”

“Either is mistaken.  And, if I may, both are a little foolish.”

“Perhaps it is merely cowardice,” Maxime said.  “I cannot accept his death on my hands, Georges.  I cannot.  We say we are not a faction, and I will prove it.  I will not play the Danton to his Camille.”

“Do you think you could compel him?  That Camille was compelled?  Set aside your myths and classics, Maxime, for present truth: you no more sway Antoine than Danton swayed Camille.  Both give what they will, as they will, and no more.”  Georges smiled, fond.  Set his hands to the cranks of his chair and moved on.  Called back over his shoulder, “You may, at times, be foolish. But never, Maxime, have you been a coward.”

 

*

 

How strange, in these hours which might come to form his last, the way in which moments lingered.  Rather than dissolving into one another as Maxime had supposed, they seemed more like ingredients poorly folded together, as bread made by the hand of an apprentice will have here a streak of raw flour and there a burst of unmixed salt.  Thus Maxime stumbled home from the Jacobin Club at some indeterminate hour beyond midnight.  In his mouth remained the title of dictator as Javogues hurled it at him, the shouts and threats of Billaud and Collot as they were driven from the club, his own final words: ‘My friends, you have just heard my last will and testament.  If you forsake me, you shall see how calmly I shall drink the hemlock.’  David’s words, following in their wake, as sweetness may oft’ turn bitter: ‘I will drink it with you.’  
  
Jesus broke bread with his disciples on the night he was betrayed, Maxime recalled, as he entered the Duplay courtyard.  _This is My body, which is for you…_   Their teeth must have ground upon shards of bone.  Their tongues must have found within the dough the salt and sweet of flesh.  
  
A thin sliver of light showed through the drawn curtains of the salon, the beacon which told him that Éléonore waited. Maxime ascended the private staircase.  With each step he reminded himself of Georges’s warning: do not be too much amongst the despair of others.  It was not the way of men to spend such nights as this in the company of women, even those as valiant as Jeanne d’Arc and Zenobia combined: there remained too much of softness, too tender a sorrow there.  Such moments were an invitation to misgivings, to idle thoughts better held at bay until truth itself dawned on the ‘morrow.  Maxime could not say, however, that he was yet stoic enough not to think of Éléonore at all.  Not to want the comfort of her hand in his while they sat together, or to feel the pull of her silent understanding.  Yet this want were merely the shadow of another, more profound desire.  It would be an ugly thing, a profound and selfish cruelty, to make Éléonore the mere echo of another in these remaining hours.  
  
Even now, as Maxime entered his room, part of him waited.  The same part that had shaped every shadow into Antoine’s form and figure or  heard the ring of his step in the slightest sound and his voice from the least whisper.  With the slightest slip of vigilance, Maxime imagined Antoine: not here, but at the Committee, beset again by Billaud and Collot, importuned and dragged into their embrace.  
  
_Why is there silence between us?_ Antoine had asked, and now Maxime saw the cruelty in what he had done: in creating this state of unknowing, this fever of the imagination.  He regretted nothing save, perhaps, for his disavowal of friendship.  Nonetheless, to unshackle Antoine from claims of factionalism, to demonstrate at last the essence of their ideals: not a schoolboy’s childish devotion to a friend one knows to be wrong, but a man’s commitment to the patrie, to what is right and virtuous, and only then to the individual who best embodied it.  He had shown them the very philosophy of rightful love and would not condemn it now.  Yet this waiting!  This state of unknowing!  This most profound trust and faith, and the terror that lay beyond it!    
  
As he prepared for bed- unbound his hair, slipped into his nightshirt and drawers- Maxime could not say what he most desired.  In its raw and base state, love demanded that Antoine survive, that his brilliance find a way to be carried forth.  But everything he believed true of Antoine’s goodness and purity of soul, his unwavering _vertu_ and his courage, transmuted this base lead of emotion to gold.  Thus he imagined his friend upon the doorstep, accepting this final, heroic sacrifice, the words upon his lips: _to live on, Maxime, is to be enchained to all the criminal passions we have battled; I had rather death, and the embrace of posterity._   Good God, then, what was this black pit that stretched wide its mouth and devoured Maxime’s final hours with the suggestion that Antoine would prove untrue.  That Maxime had given all of himself into the keeping of falseness, embraced so sweetly, so beautifully deceptive, a mirage.  Some cold and hideous voice, the mockery of his own, seemed to whisper: Pétion, Danton, Camille.  Oh, but what greater cruelty than to face death without Antoine!  To be denied the consolation of his presence in the afterlife!       
  
Maxime crossed to the door of his private staircase with halting steps.  He bowed his head against the wood. _Hyacinthus crosses the threshold, the wind at his back and his arms full of flowers, to embrace his broken Apollo.  Ares throws wide the door to seize further victory upon a field of rumpled sheets.  Harmodius ignores the warning of the gods, drinks deep and long of love in Aristogeiton’s arms one final time, and goes full-knowing to meet Hipparchus’ spear…  Harmodius goes…_  
  
_Why is there silence between us?_  
  
Maxime accepted.  He locked the door.  He would not see him again.  
       

*

  
Did he sleep, then?  Maxime thought not, and yet unaccountably found himself waking to a sound at the outer door, barely heard over the pre-dawn clatter in the workshop below.  A familiar knock, a variation on the theme of love: uncertainty.  A voice followed, Maxime’s name carried upon it.  Blessedly, there were none here to see how swiftly Maxime threw back the covers then, battling their hold upon his ankles as he stumbled free, urgency and the lingering langour of a restless sleep causing him to trip over his own ankles.  He managed the door to find Antoine, one hand clutching the handle of his briefcase and the other hovering undecided in the air.  His surprise, the uncertainty stamped upon his worn and tired face, bit more deeply into Maxime’s heart than his very presence.  
  
“Let me in, Maxime,” Antoine said at last.  
  
Maxime stepped back, more from habit than decision.  As he had countless times before, Antoine slipped past Maxime into the study.  With infinite care, he placed his briefcase in the centre of Maxime’s desk, avoiding the slightest disruption of his papers.  He looked about the room as though memorising the place of every book upon the shelf, the precise location of pen and inkwell, the exact sentences left unfinished in Maxime’s documents and notes.  Maxime, for his part, watched him with a thousand apologies upon his tongue, a thousand questions, a thousand reassurances.  He felt…  
  
He felt.  
  
“We need say nothing else of what has passed for me this night, than that I am now tasked with delivering a report on the unity of the Committee of Public Safety,” Antoine said.  
  
He did not turn ‘round, and for that Maxime was grateful.  If Antoine turned, Maxime thought he would be as Semele faced with the glory of Zeus.  He would burn.  He would be reduced to ash.  Oh, he thought, but how much better, to die thus, rather than beneath the dripping blade and the blue dome of Heaven.  
  
“I intend to speak my heart, which is rent.  Of the nation, and how it must be healed.  Of you.”  Antoine’s hands clenched so tight at his sides that his arms trembled.  “Stubborn, unclear, reckless- Maxime, so _reckless_ \- but irreproachable, constant, pure, virtuous.  Unworthy of such bitter treatment.”  
  
“You have decided, then…”  
  
Antoine’s laugh was bitter, unripe.  “There was never any decision before me: criminal vice or lawful virtue, justice or injustice, the profundity of friendship or the perversion of alliance.  What man would call this choice?”  
  
“Antoine.”  
  
He turned, then and- wonder!- Maxime did not burn.  Or rather, he burned with nothing more than a longing for him so profound, so sharp, that Maxime thought less of Semele and more of Zeus’ brutal shears, of being sliced apart and wanting, wanting…  
  
Antoine captured his wrist in the circle of his fingers and bent to Maxime’s hand, his breath hot against the palm, lips trailing kisses in its wake.  Surely Socrates was seduced thus, Maxime thought, by Alcibiades’ large and imploring eyes glimmering up at him through the fall of such long lashes.    
  
“Have ever…”  
  
A kiss to Maxime’s wrist, teeth teasing at the pulse.  
  
“…you known…”  
  
Another pressed, soft and lingering, to the very centre of his palm.  
  
“…this mouth…”  
  
Brushed light across the backs of his fingers.  
  
“…to lie?”  
  
“Never,” he said.  “Never.”  
  
Maxime buried the fingers of his free hand in the warm weight of Antoine’s curls, winding them ‘round the spindle of his fingers.  The blade hung in the back of his mind- heavy, sharp and slaked with gore.  He ignored it.  Did a blade not hang over a man every day, from the instant of his birth?  Let it fall when it would, then, so long as it was not now.  
  
“I have always been certain.  These years have been but the alignment of every part of myself,” Antoine said.  “I do not waver.”  
  
He stood then, it seemed, with no purpose but to cradle Maxime’s head in his hands and study him as though looking upon something lost and now recovered.  There was no shame in his eyes, no weakness in his grip, no hesitation.  He smiled, as fragile as a single candle flame against the wide, encompassing dark of the night.  
  
“It is but a little death I ask of you now,” he said.  “Maxime, my beloved friend.”  
  
Maxime wanted to protest, to argue that this was no time to make love, but he could not find the words.  Not when he was already bearing his friend backwards into his darkened chamber, bereft of all light but that which came thin and wavering from the courtyard.  Not when Antoine’s hand was already beneath his nightshirt, skimming it high over his hip to get at the ties of his drawers.  Not when Maxime could taste salt at the corner of his friend’s eyes, which must surely only be sweat gathered in the thin creases slowly fanning there.  Not when they both were bare and Antoine rolled beneath him in silent offering, nor when Maxime settled low between his friend’s parted legs.  
  
Maxime sank his thumbs into the tender flesh above the subtle points of Antoine’s hipbones, with no purpose but to steady them both against so heady a moment.  When he tried to speak, the only sound that emerged was dry and rasped as something effaced by time and wind and sand.  He settled instead for curling his hand ‘round the perfect curve of Antoine’s ankle, bending his friend's leg carefully back until he had merely to bow his head that he might kiss the smooth skin atop Antoine's foot.  For setting that same ankle upon his shoulder before slipping his hand beneath Antoine’s other leg, lifting it to hook amiably ‘round his hip.  Maxime shifted close, meaning to settle in the cradle of Antoine’s hips, to slip that thickening length between the close press of his own thighs and rock against him.  The motion, however, first brushed Maxime’s sex against that part of Antoine’s body that he had never sought to breech.  Yet how such desire seized him now!  What more comfort could he ask than to be sealed together so tightly, so inescapably, that he would know every part of his friend’s body that he might reach?  
  
Maxime could not hear their breath.  He only heard the thundering of his heart, something that might have been the rush of blood through his veins.  His arms trembled where they braced against the mattress: from the weight of Antoine’s legs, from the weight of their gaze on one another, more felt than seen in these murky, pre-dawn hours.  Antoine seemed to shiver, like a man consumed by fever.  And then he spoke.  
  
“Yes.  Yes, there, my dear friend.”  
  
“You are no Cretan, Antoine,” Maxime murmured, thumb stroking the line of muscle on the inside of Antoine’s thigh.  Steel sheathed in silk, hard beneath the soft.  How had he never noticed before?  “Your Spartans would disapprove.”  
  
“Leonidas is dead, as soon we may be,” Antoine replied, his voice rich and dark, thick and sweet as treacle.  “Ares is in your bed.  He welcomes you.”  
  
Maxime laughed, though the sound rang hollow.  He laughed like a man standing upon some great precipice, preparing for the fall and feigning unconcern.  His hand slipped down the back of Antoine’s thigh to cradle the curve of his buttock, stroking the juncture between bottom and thigh.  Delaying the question, the answer, he bent to kiss the slight rise of muscle at his breast, accounting for each rib by lips and tip of tongue.  As if born from the sea, Antoine tasted of salt and surged beneath him like a wave.  In drinking him, Maxime only thirsted more.  
  
“Am I turned to Aphrodite in this tale, then?” Maxime managed to ask.  
  
“It is a new myth, this.  You need be no one other than yourself.”  
  
“And you?  Be none but yourself, now, not even some antique god.”  As he spoke, Maxime brought his hand ‘round to gently enclose Antoine’s sex, working him towards full hardness in steady, practiced strokes.  Antoine sighed into the touch, lifting his hips, one hand clutching Maxime’s braced arm.  “Be thus, only,” Maxime said quietly, “Antoine…Léon…Saint-Just.”  
  
He separated each segment of his friend’s name with a kiss: now upon his chest, his neck, his mouth.  Antoine shifted beneath Maxime’s subtle weight as though seeking to bring them together.  His long fingers trailed a series of questions, of innocent uncertainties, over Maxime’s back, the initial swell of his buttocks.  
  
“I know a little of how it is done,” Antoine said, his voice once again possessing the profound sincerity with which he had first offered himself. “Be in me.  There is no shame between us.”  
  
“No.”  
  
Antoine froze beneath him.  Maxime realised, most painfully, the brutal simplicity of his tone.  
  
“Done wrongly it is an agony, and a humiliation,” he amended.  “There is need of time, to do such a thing well- and I would venture nothing with you that was not done well.  But there are other things we might...”  
  
“What you will,” Antoine said.  “And soon.”  
  
How strange time seemed then, how ponderous and heavy, how indistinct, like summer’s lingering dusk.  With purpose, yet without thought, Maxime turned Antoine over onto hands and knees.  His fingers lingered over each nub of Antoine’s spine, while his mouth caressed the younger man’s shoulder, the nape of his neck.  He stroked Antoine’s hair back so he might lean forward to kiss a string of necessary questions against the shell of Antoine’s ear.  Turned Antoine’s face to breathe apologies and reassurances between modestly parted lips.    
  
The air seemed thick, a pressure to be waded through as Maxime went to fetch the drying cloth from near his washbasin and lay it beneath his friend’s knees; the drawer containing the cooking oil they occasionally used upon their thighs or hands was an impossible weight for his fingers.  Maxime sniffed to check it had not yet gone rancid, and then, satisfied that it should serve, settled once more upon the bed.  The oil spilled across his fingers, already liquid from the heat: warm, viscous, the scent strong on the still air.  Antoine inhaled with the sharp, animal sound of a restive, fractious excitement.  Maxime set his slick fingers at the lowest point of Antoine’s spine before slipping them down, downward still, pressing and teasing, waiting for that moment when, without his demanding it, Antoine’s entire body seemed to relent and give over to him.  
  
“This is the first time I have…” Maxime murmured.  “You are…”  
  
Antoine shuddered.        
  
“You are,” Maxime said, pressing deep.  “The only one.”  
  
It was not Ares who cried forth victory then, but Antoine, as though he had given and gained something all at once.  His head bowed low towards the bracket of his arms; arms that momentarily faltered before Antoine managed to gather their strength again.  Maxime remained still, waiting, stroking himself with a poor approximation of the heat and taut pressure ‘round his index finger.  
  
“Your hand,” Antoine said then, reaching blindly back for him.  “Upon me.”  
  
Maxime gave it, gladly, so he might not come too quick to the edge.  Their joined hands, fused at finger and palm, closed ‘round Antoine’s sex.  They were swift, as all old lovers are, to find point and counterpoint: the thrust of Maxime’s finger inside him matched to the cant of Antoine’s hips, crooked within his body even as the thumb of his other hand swept over the head of Antoine’s sex.  
  
“We need not hurry,” Maxime murmured.  
  
The words, strangely, only served to drive Antoine to greater urgency.  Maxime stopped, therefore, entirely: the press of his finger stilled, his other hand resisting Antoine’s attempts to move upon it.  At last his friend paused, his head bowed, breathing like a wounded animal.  
  
“You need not hurry,” Maxime repeated.  
  
The threat of dawn and of death.  A body wound too tight, even, to seize such transient pleasures.  There was no time to prepare him, to take him with more than fingers.  There was no time.  Yet how slow Maxime moved, how slow.  Only now did he join the first finger with a second, feeling how Antoine moaned, even, how he cinched him tight and strained to take even so little.  And oh, if part of Maxime mourned all their lost hours, the theft of their peaceful future, then he would still seize all he could of these remaining moments.  His mouth ran warm with praise.  He matched the thrust of his fingers to the pace of his devotions.  His own voice became worn, raw, as Antoine’s breathing grew ragged, his limbs taut and trembling upon the edge of climax.  
  
“A moment,” Maxime said, reluctantly slipping his fingers free as he mouthed a kiss low on Antoine’s back.  “But a moment, my dear friend.”  
  
Maxime had the measure, now, of how unbearably tight Antoine was.  He settled behind him and pressed Antoine’s thighs so close that to enter them provided the same momentary struggle as entering a man’s body, that the sheath of Antoine’s thighs, slick with fresh sweat and running with oil, was almost painful.  A hand upon Antoine’s shoulder, his hip, to keep him in place, Maxime pushed between them again, again once more, barely stifling the cry that rose in his throat.  Each motion brought again the shock and spark of pleasure, coiled tight between his legs and yet felt throughout his entire body.  All classical allusion fled.  They were left two mortal men tangled together, murmuring a thousand half-heard words of praise and plea and demand.  Maxime groaned at the heat of Antoine's body, the flexed pressure of his thighs, as close around his sex as the entrance to his body had felt ‘round his fingers.  He took him in long, firm strokes that shuddered the breath from his lungs, that made Antoine groan and twist his fingers in the sheets.  
  
And then Antoine pressed back, shifting to fold them close, Maxime upon his knees and Antoine in his lap.  Their pace came quicker now that Antoine controlled it.  Maxime lost track of anything but the hand that Antoine seized and closed ‘round himself, guiding the motion in time to each rise and fall, the warmth and slickness that surrounded him.  His hand clutched at Antoine’s breast even as Antoine’s arm hooked ‘round his neck.  And then Antoine clenched his thighs still tighter, pressed Maxime close, his body shaking and Maxime’s following in its wake.  Smothering his cry against Antoine’s shoulderblade, Maxime came, spilling over his thighs, between his legs.  Antoine followed but an instant later with a wracked, shaking breath.  
  
They collapsed alongside one another, breathing hard and wet with sweat.  Laughing, their hands resting upon each other’s waists. It was Antoine who rose to clean them both, to strip away the soiled cloth, and then they lay the same once more, their legs tangled together, their gaze upon one another.  Maxime felt he knew, in that moment, all his friend thought and felt.  Perhaps, after all, he always had.  But the thin light of earliest dawn fell through the window now, and exhaustion was stealing over him.  Everything continued to turn to one single point: there was no time.     
  
“Your speech,” he murmured.  
  
His hand was already a heavy, half-dead thing when Antoine raised it and pressed it to his breast.  
  
“Was written long ago,” he said.

 

*

 

Waking but a short time later, Maxime found Antoine finally asleep: his hair fanned out on the pillow, his incomparable face released by exhaustion, Maxime considered the moments just passed.  Sometimes, amongst the pigeons, there was a coupling even while one partner lay dying.  It was the way of life, Maxime thought, to struggle for continuance.  Their union, though infertile, one final grasp towards completion.

 

*

 

When Maxime woke again it was to a room suffused with sunlight, the humid air heavy with the scent of sweat and lovemaking.  From the sharp quality of the light, he put the hour somewhere near seven in the morning, though such a thing could hardly be credited.  Indeed, Maxime might have thought all the events of the night no more than some wishful dream were it not for the weight of the body dipping the bed beside him.  He turned, then, and sat up.  Took in first the scattered wake of their clothes, the sheets in a hopeless knot.  Lingered at last on Antoine’s well-shaped form, just now stirring from sleep with slow blinks and the stretching of his long legs.  
  
They rose quickly, then: Maxime to prepare for the barber’s arrival, Antoine to compose the speech he had been tasked with.  There was but little time to seize upon the niceties of waking together, and indeed the memory of their past hours left them both with a certain ruddy-cheeked joy and also a certain shyness.  It was not shame that disposed them such, to dance ‘round each other with a moment’s glance and lingering touch, but rather the knowledge that they had released each other from certain shackles.  That they had rarely given over to one another so absolutely, and with such singular minds.  There was, Maxime thought, both a greatness and a terror in knowing one another so entirely.  
  
“Maxime.”  
  
He looked up from tying his cravat to see Antoine standing almost speculatively before his open wardrobe, his hand moving over the garments there.  He stopped at last and pulled one forward until Maxime saw a familiar blue.  Immediately, he recalled the sweetness of that bright day, and his longing to share it with his friend.  Antoine’s gaze upon the coat was thoughtful, almost tender.  
  
“I never saw you wear it,” he said.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Philippe and I celebrated, you know.  In the field.  Did I speak of it?” Antoine smiled, his gaze settled somewhere else entirely, as on a distant memory.  “We sang and raised a toast.  I imagined you.”  
  
Maxime could imagine it, his two young friends in their simple barracks.  The sweet hymn of their voices: ‘Père de l’Univers, suprême intelligence…’  
  
“I shall wear it today, then,” he said.  Omitting the thought that followed swift upon its heels: _perhaps for the final time._  
  
They parted, with some few kisses more fraternal than those shared earlier.  If the Convention proved false, Maxime supposed, then perhaps here was the final moment in which to press him to his breast, to memorise all the lines of his body, his scent in the early morning.  He thought, by the tightness of Antoine’s embrace, by the depth of his breathing, that the other man must share something of the same sentiment.  They would not speak of it.  They would only share an adieu at the door, and continue as they must.  
  
Intending, then, to go downstairs and join the Duplay's at their table before the arrival of the barber, Maxime opened the door only to find Éléonore in the corridor, her arms full of sheets to be laundered.  For a moment they both stood, still and staring.  He knew what she must see: that his step today was somewhat lighter, that though his eyes were underscored by dark shadows they possessed a certain calm, that the knot of his cravat was tied a little more precisely because Antoine had insisted on doing so.  For his part, he saw how the colour bloomed in her face and how her gaze darted towards the open door, seeking a figure but recently departed.  
  
“I know," she said, before Maxime could speak.  "I suppose I have always known.”  
  
He took a step closer.  Might, in the past, have touched her.  Now, however, such action seemed instead a wretched cruelty.  He had not the time to explain in full, to pour out all his heart to her.  
  
“Then why, dear one…?”  
  
Meaning any number of things.  Why had she never raged at him?  Why had she never told Maurice?  Why…?  She looked at him then, the skin beneath her eyes bruised with sleeplessness, with the same frank honesty as Antoine possessed.  He supposed that is why he had loved her too, always, in his own way: this honesty and purity of soul, this unbearable goodness.  
  
“I understand him, I suppose.  That he should love you, or you him, seems nothing so remarkable,” she said.  “And we are all widows now, Maxime.  A murder of them.  There is some sympathy in that, at least.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apart from my usual sources, I've quoted extensively from Robespierre's speech of 8 Thermidor which can be found in its full translation [here](https://www.academia.edu/21886940/Robespierres_speech_of_8_Thermidor_Year_II).
> 
>  
> 
> **General Notes:**
> 
>  
> 
>  **pompa-** The ritualised entrance to a gladiatorial event.
> 
>  **heniochoi and parabatai-** Saint-Just is making a reference to the charioteers and their companions of the Sacred Band of Thebes. I should perhaps note that Le Bas actually has no idea what he's referring to when he asks him to be such a good friend.
> 
>  **...do you not hear instead the echoes of Greece and Thebes?-** Much of the framework that mlm had in the 18th century for discussing or interpreting their sexuality relied on their understanding of classical literature. Broadly speaking, Robespierre's thoughts here reflect the understandings of the time, and particularly focus on the politicised aspects tied to ancient Hellenic sexuality(ies): that is, the role that an older man played in educating a younger partner in being a good and active citizen.
> 
>  **I intend to speak my heart, which is rent.-** This is a play on Saint-Just's note, on the following morning, to say that he would be reporting directly to the Convention.
> 
>  **You are no Cretan-** In Plato's later writings, such as his _Laws_ , Plato associated Cretan society with what he perceived to be the negative influence of sexual relations between men.
> 
>  **‘Père de l’Univers, suprême intelligence…’-** Robespierre imagines Saint-Just and Le Bas singing Gossec's [Hymne à l'Etre suprème](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NM5oa51yio&feature=youtu.be)


	3. To Dare Everything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thermidor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, dear readers, here we are.
> 
> A reminder that this chapter deals with suicide, attempted suicide and suicidal ideation (in compliance with what we know of the events of 9-10 Thermidor), as well as death.

David told a tale, once, to explain a tarrying summer.  He told of how Demeter, reluctant to part from her risen daughter, would each day press Persephone with new questions and conversation, or seek to fortify her for the journey to the Underworld by offering some new treat to devour.  Dutiful child that she was, Persephone could only answer and talk and graciously consume these maternal offerings.  So it was that time slowed and summer stretched long despite its shortened days.  Even so, however, there was only so long that fate could be held at bay.  Only so long that her dread Lord would wait.  _“She had consumed the food of the dead, you see,”_ David had said, _“a single pomegranate seed, that is all, or seven in another myth.  She tasted the Lord of Death, so it goes- her mouth ran red with the blood of that fruit- and by doing so bound herself to him.  One cannot know death and cheat Him, I suppose.”_  
  
It was a charming, if grim, story, and one Madame Duplay seemed intent on proving true when Maxime took his place at the Duplay table on the bright, sharp morning of 9 Thermidor.  Grieving Demeter seemed to manifest in every gentle crease upon her face, the sharp bend of her back, the tremble in her hand.  Each moment that threatened a silence prompted her to discussion or a tumbled series of questions; every motion of his hand an offer of food or coffee.    
  
Perhaps, Maxime thought then, he had said too little of family and of love.  He had elucidated something of the consolations of faith and of the soul, of humility before the Supreme Being, yet never found a full expression of these smaller bonds and devotions.  Here was a new lesson learned in latest hours: how gentleness compelled the heart, how sublime the taste of a simple meal to the condemned man’s tongue.  The first sip of coffee chased sleep’s thickness from his tongue, deepening the flavour of Antoine’s skin that still lingered in every crevice of Maxime’s mouth.  The familiar scent of fresh-baked bread ‘roused the rare beast of his hunger, so that Maxime pressed even its falling crumbs between his lips.  Holding each mouthful on his tongue allowed him to relish the spiced sweetness of Mme Duplay’s best apricot confiture, the butter to dissolve upon his tongue.  The act of eating had always possessed more necessity and function than genuine pleasure for Maxime.  Now, however, he tasted with the clever tongue of an Epicurean: the trace of cinnamon and cider gave tartness and spice to the preserve, the slight sourness to the bread lent the creamy sweetness of the butter an exquisite subtlety.    
  
Had ever Maxime eaten before now?  How much of what he might have savoured had been lost through an ignorance of the simple grace of a loving table? Had Camille and Danton, in those moments of peace before their arrests, discovered this acceptance, this transcendent awareness?  Had Lucile, ever a most capable general upon the domestic field, marshaled Louise to their final shared table and spread upon it such simple wealth as might fortify their husbands for the coming battle?  Had they sat ‘round the table, their hearts aching even as their smiling lips parted ‘round stories and jests told a hundred times before?  Had Danton consumed his final meal with less of his accustomed gusto?  Had Camille swept his tongue ‘round the rim of his glass to gather every lingering drop there?  Later, did they bury themselves between the warm, dimpled softness of their wives’ branching thighs?  Console themselves for the cold weight of the grave by first casting themselves beneath warm and scented tresses?  Had they, then, lingered: seeing first to their wives’ pleasure so they might recall every variation in the texture of their skin, the flavour of their bodies, their scent?  
  
How strange, Maxime thought, the subtle similarities and reversals of these final moments.  Danton and Camille over the dinner table with their clever, pretty wives; Maxime settled amongst his family, one of neither blood nor paper, but of the heart.  Danton laboring over Louise’s pliant body even as Camille marveled beneath his beloved Lucile; Maxime dashed apart upon the rocky points of Antoine’s bent and shuddering body.  ‘Round some long table in the afterlife, circled by those friends who had died with them, Maxime thought that Camille and Danton must be laughing at him.  _Maxime, I have never laughed at you:_ Camille’s voice, murmuring as it had in the cloisters of Louis-le-Grand.  _I have,_ Danton grunted, _but not for this._  
        
Did Maxime, perhaps, tarry to hold these moments of revelation longer?  Time, it seemed, continued to obey a slower pace.  He moved through it as one moves through the heavy weight of a humid summer day, or wades through deep water.  In the end it was Éléonore, brave woman that she was, who made an end of it.  She who, rising from the table, stood with her narrow shoulders set firm, as though to spite the weight that must lie upon them.  Maxime thought of the drawings of Liberty made in the early days of Revolution: a spear in her hand, bare-kneed like the running girls of Sparta.  There was much of Éléonore in Her image, he thought.    
  
As Liberty put the shield into her sons’ waiting hands, saying ‘with this, or upon it,’ so Éléonore took Maxime’s and said, “He must go now, Mother.”  
  
Often, in these last months, Maxime had been glad they never married.  That he had not, in pressing some final claim upon her, left new life quickening in her womb.  That she would not know the same bleak fate Babet faced.   That she might still sever herself from the corruption his enemies would make of the very name _Robespierre_.  Still, it was a kind of sorrow not to draw her close and embrace her.  To be permitted no more than to drop his gaze to her mouth so Éléonore might know his too-late thoughts, and stand close enough for mingled breaths slipped between parted lips.  There was space, Maxime thought, for such theatre: a moment’s enactment of a path left unfollowed, having for audience no more than averted gazes and an attention placed studiously elsewhere.  
  
“Adieu, little bird,” he said.

*********

Antoine was waiting by the doors of the Convention when Maxime arrived, an oath in his hands and the light falling like a mantle over his shoulders.  
  
_You said, once, such commitments could not be written._  
  
This little jest, this teasing rebuke, came swift to Maxime’s mind only to burn away in the meeting of their eyes.  Then, Maxime’s only thought- hopelessly boyish, the foam and flotsam of a youth spent composing poetry- was that Antoine was radiant.  Not the radiance of that Endymion whose ivory, sweat-slick limbs summoned Maxime’s fingers to trace their every line and curve, nor the radiance of that heroic, Spartan youth who possessed all the ancient grace of the battlefield.  Not the radiance of that stern, Roman orator who mounted the rostrum with such force of sincerity, such perfect match of word and deed and form, that more than once he rendered the entire Convention powerless before him.  He was, somehow, all at once.  He was, somehow, more.  _‘These years have been but the alignment of every part of myself,’_ Antoine had said, and oh, Maxime saw it now, the man he had become: mortal enough, yet with something of the eternal in him, as all those flawless youths who are both caressed and doomed by the gods must be.  
  
Girodet once painted Endymion’s unsurpassed beauty, clad in nothing but moonlight and shadow.  Girodet, however, was a lesser artist than good, honest David.  Where, Maxime wondered, was the painter?  He had begun, of late, to speak more of Greeks than of Romans.  Would David’s discerning eye not delight in how Phoebus’ fingertips warmed the pallor of Antoine’s skin and sparked the subtle hints of copper in his dark curls?  Would he not admire how, at this ending of worlds, Antoine stood clad in cream and ivory and pearl: calling to mind a thousand paintings of saints and angels, of gods and heroes, the very picture of purity, of modesty and virtue.  _How like a bridegroom he looks,_ Maxime thought, _how well we are matched: as the blue wave meets the foam and the sand, or the sky is touched with the palest cloud._   Maxime knew, beyond doubt then, beyond any necessity of affirmation, that such was Antoine’s intent.  He knew, and blushed to know it.    
  
Antoine’s smile, then, was a thing of almost ineffable brightness and joy.  Maxime knew it, and knew it well.  He had seen it burst into bloom each time Antoine expressed some long-held idea that he had at last perfected and refined enough to speak aloud.  On rare, peaceful dawns he had traced its sprawl across those graciously curved lips before capturing it with his own.  Oh, it was a thing of beauty and tenderness that nonetheless knocked all the breath from Maxime’s lungs; it was a fist in his throat and a stone in the pit of his belly.  Antoine spoke often about friends upon the battlefield, yet now- against all reason and knowledge- Maxime thought that no friends had ever stood to lose so much: a dream, a nation, each other.  
  
“Let us go in, Maxime,” Antoine said.  “It is nearly time.”  
  
There was no fraternal embrace.  There was only Antoine’s hand briefly clasping Maxime’s own, warm and slightly worn, firm and stainless.  
  
_“We will go to the temple, you and I,”_ his beloved friend once said, _“And in front of everyone I will declare our friendship for all of Paris, all of France, to see.  I will swear only to you.”_      
  
And so they stood together, at the altar of Thermidor.

*********

Maxime was cold, despite the oppressive warmth of the day.  The close, moist air and heavy scent of so many gathered bodies so close together hung upon him like a weight.  Sweat beaded upon his upper lip, rolling beneath cravat and collar; he shivered.  By the time the other members of the Committee arrived, shortly after the session opened at eleven, the sensation had settled upon him like the chills that beset him before each bout of illness.  It deepened to the very bone as Couthon’s gaze- devoid of anger, devoid of anything but the greatest hurt and disappointment at having been excluded from these final deliberations- settled upon his.    
  
The call of Antoine’s name came like a bitter gale to summon the younger man.  Maxime shuddered, barely restraining the trembling in his limbs as his friend rose.  Without a glance, and with only the barest glance of his fingertips upon Maxime’s shoulder, Antoine descended the steps and mounted the rostrum.  
  
It was impossible for Maxime not to recall another moment: as worn and familiar as boyhood, yet in reality almost unbearably recent.  It was impossible not to be struck as he had from the very first- and indeed, he supposed, every time hence- as though Antoine’s very presence amongst them were a stroke of lightning.  Maxime yearned, he leaned forward, he loved, as ever he had.  His friend was older now- the last roundedness of youth carved away, skin mapped by thin lines that suggested all of his expression- and yet, wonder!, nothing had changed.  Antoine, more than anyone, was as constant as the constellations by which men navigate the wild, precarious seas.  
  
“I do not belong to any faction,” Antoine began, voice ringing forth so mightily that it was as though the room were empty.  “I will fight them all.  They never die except by institutions that will make human pride bend beneath the yoke of liberty.”  
  
_Speak, then, Lycurgus!_ Maxime thought to leap up and declare it.  Only the thought of how his enemies would then abuse him restrained the strident impulse.  And yet Antoine’s words worked within him like the the first warm breath of thaw, or the life-giving rain of spring.  
  
“The course of events has meant that this tribune of harangues is perhaps the Tarpeian Rock for he who would say honestly that certain members of the government have abandoned the route of wisdom.  I believed you were due the truth, offered with caution, and that one cannot break with delicacy the commitment undertaken with one’s conscience to dare everything for the salvation of the _patrie_.”  
  
Antoine’s words, his voice, were smooth and steady; effortless, as though he did not stand as one man before an entire army.  Maxime found himself so warmed by them that the words seemed, almost, to move through his veins like the rise and flow of sap through the dormant oak.  He felt, for the first time in many weeks, a thing he had not dared: hope.  
  
“What language will I speak to you?  How to describe for you errors that you have no idea of, and make understandable the evil that one word can reveal, that one word can correct?”  Antoine paused, his gaze sweeping the Convention.  “Your Committees of Public Safety and of General Security have charged me with presenting you a report on the commotion that public opinion has just experienced in these latter times…”    
  
Maxime didn’t dare look ‘round, only clutched at his knees and leaned forward as if he could no longer hear.  
  
“I demand the floor!”  
  
Tallien’s voice, sharp, cold as steel or ice, was a thing more felt than heard.  Certainly, in the moments that followed, his words seemed forged into a single blade to be driven through the Convention.  What was it he said?  What?  Some strange things about the republic and liberty, about the _patrie_ , a sort of accounting of himself and of them.  Mad things.  Lies.  _Ah,_ Maxime thought, utterly calm, utterly composed, _so they have decided to kill me with words rather than with blades._   The laughter on Maxime’s tongue, twisting his lips, tasted of bile.  He looked at Antoine, still and silent upon the rostrum.  An image came to mind: one of swords and flowers.  How David- where was David?- ought to have painted him so posterity would know the truth.  Instead, would not their enemies shape him into a frozen, frightened boy, cowed before the might of men.  Would they not say how they had seen it all along, this fatal softness in the womanish stamp of his smooth skin and delicate cravats, the curves of his small mouth and large eyes.  
  
Billaud rose now, knocking Maxime from his reverie with a voice that came close to the thunderous heaves of Danton’s oratory.  Lesser, in every possible way, than the man he emulated and echoed.  Every part of Maxime wanted to shout, to demand the floor, to tear away this facade of sham and trickery they were erecting.  Wanted to, but hesitated, knowing that his slightest motion, his slightest word, was watched and attended to.  Speak, and die.  Stand, and die.  Be silent, and die.  Be still, and die.  But oh, to be buried beneath this weight of lies!  To be so calumniated, yet to sit as though his tongue had been ripped from its very roots and he a mere insensate thing to sit and swallow this bitter draught.  To sit and drink it all, like it were blood from his uprooted tongue.  
  
A flash of motion, then, in the corner of Maxime’s eye: Le Bas, that golden, heroic youth, the object of all his students’ admiration even as his own gaze followed Antoine.  Poor Philippe, his voice raw as he demanded to speak, the pale skin ‘round his eyes ruddied as if with incessant weeping.    
  
“I demand that Le Bas is called to order!”  
  
“And I demand that I have…”  
  
“Have him obey the decree, or send him to the Abbayé!”  
  
Maxime, upon hearing this, upon seeing how his young friend turned to him,hands outstretched in supplication, could not but feel his heart within his chest.  Feel it, as though all the veins and arteries had been severed and the whole structure cut loose within his body.  The hand Maxime pressed upon it, without any conscious thought, was only to assure himself that it remained, still beating.  That he lived still and were not, instead, somewhere very like to Hell.  
  
Everything seemed to Maxime, then, to move very fast.  Was he bound within some Grecian tragedy: blighted by capricious gods, the Convention itself a chorus ranged against them?  On all sides came rising shouts of ‘down with the tyrant!’, something of blood and of butchery, of horror and trembling.    
  
_Aiai! Who ever would have thought my name would harmonise so aptly with my woes?  For now well may I wail that sound out twice, yea thrice; such woeful destinies are mine!_    
  
Maxime had often spoken of actors.  Now, it seemed, he was made one himself: trapped within a performance penned by another’s hand, by some great and terrible author of his incontrovertible fate.  Who was this man the Chorus made of him?  They shaped him and shouted him down, as the sculptor chips the marble or the carpenter his wood, forming Maxime into something he was not.  Something he had never been.  A monster, it seemed, to be passed down and reviled through the ages.  
  
It was this last thought, perhaps, that ripped the mantle of fatal lethargy from Maxime’s shoulders and drove him to his feet.  His legs ached from sitting so long, from the tension he had restrained in them, but what of it?  They were strong enough still to send him hurtling down the steps to reach the tribune.  To demand…  
  
“Down!” howled the Chorus.  “Down with the tyrant!”  
  
Maxime’s hand gripped the edge of the tribune’s railing.  He turned, then, to where Antoine still stood, and looked up at him.  Oh, how long Maxime had looked up at his young friend, his beloved companion.  _Those eyes,_ Maxime thought, _those eyes_ : all the unfathomable depth and light and sorrow of a church statue.  As solid and inviolable, sometimes, as marble.  Only moving now, now when Tallien…as Tallien was saying…what was Tallien saying?  
  
“…I am armed with a dagger in order to pierce the tyrant’s breast, if the Convention will not issue a _décret d'accusation_ against him!”

  
Only then did Antoine move, in a slow unfolding and uncrossing of limbs, to edge between them.  Maxime might have dared to push forward, to challenge Tallien’s courage.  Might have, had Antoine not put an arm out to stay him.  On, then, their voices rolled: Tallien, Billaud, the Chorus now no more than their echo.  Decree after decree passed: Dumas, Boulanger, Dufraise.  And ‘down with the tyrant! down with the tyrant!’ they shrieked, with all the mindless exultation of the mob.  They shouted so loud that the sound seemed to shake the very windows, coalescing to a buzzing in Maxime’s ears, forcing his voice back down his throat. One by one, they assembled against him, enemies he had known and enemies he had not: Vadier and Bourdon de l’Oise; Barère, who had at least the grace to flush with shame and avoid Maxime’s gaze.

“Certainly,” Tallien was in the midst of saying, his voice rolling over the Convention in smooth, oily waves, that clung to them all.  “If I wanted to recount the particular acts of oppression that have taken place, I would note that it was during the time where Robespierre has been in charge of the general police that they were committed; that the patriots of the revolutionary committee of the Indivisibilité section have been arrested.”  

“That is false!” Maxime yelled, unable to restrain himself.  He pressed hard against Antoine’s arm where it persisted in shielding him, barring him, protecting him.  He looked towards his friends, his fellow Montagnards, these men he had trusted.  As Peter denied Christ, they turned from him.  Now they gave him only their silence, though yesterday they had professed to him the greatest devotions of love and sincerity.  

“It is to you, pure men, that I speak,” he cried.   “Not to the brigands…”

Their rage howled down upon him.  Howled, as Antoine turned towards him as if he meant to fold Maxime ‘neath his bent body as a soldier might shield his dear friend from a hail of arrows.  Antoine stopped at the last instant, stricken and hesitant, an invisible barrier between them that must not, could not, be breached.  Maxime seized the opportunity to lean harder against Antoine’s arm, to manage another step higher upon the tribune.  Let Tallien’s blade come, let it fall, it would be better…

“For the last time, president of assassins,” Maxime cried.  “I demand the floor!”

And oh, his voice was but a thin reed, bent beneath the virulent gust of winged words and fetid breath.  Still Maxime tried to raise it, to wrest back the representative’s support. 

The muscles in Antoine’s arm tensed, no longer as though he would simply hold onto him, as though Maxime were being pulled, even now, from his embrace.

“The blood of Danton chokes him!” Garnier jeered.

“So it is Danton you wish to avenge,” Maxime roared back.  “Then why did you not speak for him?”

“I demand a _décret d'accusation_ against Robespierre!”

Maxime could not speak.  He could not.  It was a fist in his throat, this noise, their hatred.  When…?

And then, clear in the stunned quiet that followed: “I am as guilty as my brother: I share his virtues; I want to share his fate.  I also demand the _décret d'accusation_.”

That sweet voice, known to him from boyhood.  Maxime recalled its chatter, how Bonbon’s hurried words babbled together with a noise like a flock of birds, taking on its sweetness and depth as he reached manhood.  Maxime had not thought it possible for his soul to be further rent, yet now unfurled in tatters and shreds. He swayed and yet stood.  He swayed and yet cried first for their compassion, then for the president and last upon them all with that part of him which still burned at the injustice of it all.

“I will not share the opprobrium of making this decree,” Philippe cried out, rising to embrace the storm unleashed upon them all.  “I also demand the arrest.”

There was no objection.  It was enough, Maxime supposed, to share in their friendship.  On and on ran the stories and tales, building one upon the other, forming a wall of insurmountable iniquity.  They had all demanded a further insurrection, and meant to purify the Convention by forces of slaughter and outrage.  Couthon, they declared, thirsted for blood and sought to mount to a throne made of bone.  Antoine had gone pale and fainted at the first accusation of a triumvirate.  Oh now they made of Antoine a faint and yielding boy, more woman than man: he, whom they had so embraced and called Achilles and Mars, a warrior and an athlete.  Now they mocked and invented, told one another bedtime stories of monsters and knaves and tyrants.  Spoke on and on until every sound was but nonsense, a fugue of cowardice and rage.  

At last, when all their character had been utterly destroyed, the record entirely rewritten, they were called to descend to the bar.  Maxime went as though he were some marionette, helpless against the invisible strings binding him.  He would neither fall nor falter before them.  Roman, incorruptible to the last: he would have that, at least.  It was an easier choice to make, perhaps, now that he felt nothing.  The inferno of their words and accusation had, for now, cauterised his wounded heart; he neither mourned nor raged nor trembled.  Only once did something within him seem like to lurch and give way, as dark water shifts and bubbles beneath a layer of ice.  Once, and this when he looked upon the others.  When he found Couthon’s wry and twisted smile, Phillipe’s tear-filled eyes, his brother…Augustin…Bonbon.

“Ah.”

The sound issued from Maxime as if he had been punched.  As if he were pierced through.  He might have stumbled, were it not for Antoine’s hand: there, suddenly, firm and warm upon his back so he might walk on.  Ever on.

*********

They had called Maxime the leader of the faction, the head of the triumvirate, yet in the hours that followed their arrest it seemed that Antoine bound them together.  Perhaps, Maxime thought, it stemmed from his times with the army: when discipline must be made to walk hand in hand with camaraderie, so men would more readily embrace both one another and threat of death, rather than run to the sheltering arms of some waiting mother or mistress.  So it was in the Secretariat where they were brought their dinner.  Maxime rested, a tired and battered general, though he kept what cheer he could and would not bare the misgivings of his heart to them (though Bonbon often looked in his direction and attempted to cajole him from his silences).  It was Antoine who remained ceaseless in his energy.  He spoke to Hanriot, defeated as he was in his attempts to rescue them, as though they were merely chatting over a game of cards.  He teased Philippe for weeping and stroked the tears from his lashes so they might sing a few lines together.  He sat close by Georges throughout dinner and- here, it seemed, Maxime’s heart faltered and broke apart, though he concealed it well enough- took the rags of meat from his own soup and silently added it to the older man’s bowl.

It went on, in such manner, so that eventually even Maxime could not but smile.  He took Bonbon’s hand and even laughed, now and again.  The cloud of his thoughts seemed chased away by all of Antoine’s brightness, which seemed to blaze still higher here.  What spark of hope remained, cloistered deep within Maxime’s heart, was fed and fanned by that sweet breath, sheltered by Maxime’s faith in the people and the Republic.  Oh, how relieved he was to find his hope still there, in the end: to know he had lost nothing of himself in these years of tumult and turmoil.  Even so, when the gendarmes arrived at last, it was as though a chill wind blew through the room.  That light, that light he had nourished so long, guttered before their presence.  Was buffeted again at the declaration that they should be separated.

Even so, Maxime managed to stand.  To conceal, or so he hoped, how he winced at the pain in his legs and the wave of unsteadiness that battered him.  His friends, his family, his captors, Antoine: all their eyes were upon him.  Maxime raised his head.

“Our judge is the people, and the _patrie_ ,” he said, half-marveling at the strength of the voice that emerged from his throat. “We trust their justice.  Let us show the conspirators how we will face them.”

There were some cheers at that, thought they ran thin and cool as the soup they had just consumed.

“Well,” Couthon declared, clapping Antoine on the shoulder. “I don’t suppose I’m in a position to run anyhow.”

It was Antoine, however, who stepped forward first.  The gendarmes stirred at this provocation as though they knew not where to look or what to do.  In this, too, Maxime could not but see some hope that they might greet the day as free men.  Antoine stood alone then, beautiful and courageous.  Maxime looked upon this moment as one might look upon some extraordinary painting: the downcast eyes of the officers at contrast with their poised arms, Antoine before them as calm and composed as ever.  It stirred something in Maxime’s heart: love, perhaps.  Not the simple love of one man for another, but rather a love that encompassed the nation, the Republic, and this man who represented all of it.  Maxime took his place at Antoine’s side, as they had always, for scant years that felt more like an eternity, taken their place by one another sides.

“We are together, my friends.  Always.  Even to the end.”  

Antoine’s voice, usually so quiet and carefully modulated in close quarters, was loud enough to fill the room.  Behind them, Hanriot cleared his throat again and again once more.  Maxime understood most intimately.  There was a hand, it seemed, closed ‘round his own throat.  It tightened with each breath as though he dangled from the end of a noose.  Beside him, Antoine stretched out his arms, his palms upturned, his cuffs fallen back to disclose the thin, pale skin of his wrists, the blue tracework of veins.  _I put my lips there,_ Maxime thought, _you shook for me._   It was impossible, had always been impossible, not to be moved by him.

“Will you bind them?” Antoine asked.

Phillipe gave a half-smothered protest at this, and Georges uttered Antoine’s name as though in prayer.  Maxime, somehow, managed to confine himself merely to a sharp inhalation that was, nonetheless, loud within an otherwise quiet room.  Even the gendarmes had the good grace to stir, looking at one another with shame staining their cheeks.  And then one- no more than a boy it seemed, younger at least than the men around him- stepped forward: in courage their leader, if not reality if not in rank.  Maxime could not but think, admiring him- the frank gaze that he leveled at Antoine, the set of his shoulders- what they should have made of the world, of France, if such flowers as these could bloom in so short a time.  Here was a child of the _patrie_ , here was the order of youth Antoine had spoke of shaping.

“No,” the boy said at last, passing his bayonet back to one of his more timid comrades.  “I don’t suppose it’ll be necessary, Citizen Saint-Just.”

Antoine nodded as he submitted to the boy’s hand upon his elbow, a grip that must surely have felt no more than a child’s.  It was this, then, that gave the other gendarmes enough courage to do their duty.  All at once they moved, as ants will move about when one steps upon their nest, each of them finding a man to chaperone.  Maxime, who had never liked to be touched by those he did not know, stifled the abrupt desire to rip himself from the invasiveness of their grasp upon his arms, timid though it was.  _While we live,_ he thought, _hope remains._   To struggle was to be seen defiant of the Convention, or worse, the will of the People.  And so he followed in Antoine’s wake, only calling back some few words of courage to the others.

At the door to the Secretariat, Antoine paused.  It was the first time that Maxime had seen him come close to struggling.  He pulled against the young gendarme’s grip to look back, to say to all of them, but with eyes only for Maxime:

“We are together.  To the end.”

**The Mairie, 8:30pm**

“Long live the Republic!  Long live Robespierre!”

Thus did Maxime find himself greeted as he entered the Mairie.  Having been turned away from the Luxembourg through the patriotic loyalty of a good officer there, his baffled gendarmes transformed more or less to an honour guard, and the municipal officer an unwilling accomplice to his freedom.  These exclamations and displays of adulation that greeted him, however, Maxime waved away as soon as it could be done politely.  Something about them troubled him: it was well to cheer the Republic, but in cheering  long life to a mere man there was something of the time of tyrants, something that drew close to kings.  This, after all, was how such men first came by their crowns: having appealed to other men and won some favour from them, they snapped closed the trap and set their foot upon the People’s neck. Maxime would have none of it, neither in seriousness nor in jest.

“Come, come, good men.  You who I have long admired for your labour and dedication,” he said, taking the wine now offered him, though drinking none.  “There is much work to do tonight, if we would prevent disaster from befalling the Republic.  It is a stormy night, but if we would live to see a clear dawn we must consider our actions.”

He was proved right shortly after, when with fresh clatter and burst of noise, a deputation arrived from the Commune.  If the news they brought of the Commune rising was a startlement, then it was punctuated by the joy of knowing that Bonbon was free.  Maxime could only laugh at the report the messengers’ gave of Augustin’s impassioned and impromptu speech on the faction of Collot, Bourdon and the like, the performance so very like his brother’s fiery manner: ever more the soldier than the orator.  He could not, however, and would not go.  After all, would leaving not place his friends at the Mairie at risk?  Could this not be some ploy, so that if Maxime left now his accusers might claim that he truly aimed for a dictatorship?  Did not all their philosophy bend to the submission to the rule of law, even to the point of drinking the hemlock were it necessary to do so?

“It is true,” Maxime said at last.  “That I do not belong to myself.  That I exist- and have existed, you will recall- these five years only so I may serve the people.  But let Payan and the others know that, though it is the case, I am nonetheless bound to the nation’s laws until such point as the Convention itself has acted illegally and proved itself no more than a palace for a new set of kings.”

“Only think, Citizen Robespierre,” Boucher, the leader of the deputation, said.  “If you learn of that too late you may have lost the opportunity for escape.”

“A man should not fear death,” Maxime said.  He smiled, then, to ease the sting of what must surely have sounded like a rebuke.  “Let us consider some helpful advice, under the circumstances, to take back with you.”

It was a strange thing, he thought then, to be in the midst of such a whirl and chaos of events and words, yet to remain composed.  To feel as though nothing, any longer, touched him.  Maxime heard Tanchon and Quenel speaking of closing the gates and putting the press under seals, and spoke himself in their favour, yet none of it touched him.  Was this, then, what it meant to be a Stoic?  What it meant to be a Cicero or a Socrates?  Or rather, was it the terror that freezes the mouse before the cat and Man before the might of his Creator?

Maxime stood at the window, looking out into the night.  Across the distant skies came the flash of lightning, silent in its distance, yet no less awe-inspiring.  When he spoke, it was into his own eyes that he looked.

**10:40pm**

“They are assembling the troops!” Boucher, returned again, panted.  “They mean to surround the Hotel de Ville and pronounce us all outlawed!  You must come this time, Citizen Robespierre, everyone but Couthon is there.  Take this: it is from Payan.”

Maxime took the bit of damp paper that Boucher thrust towards him.  While the wet, ragged messenger was pressed to take a seat and drink some wine for warmth, Maxime took the note and went to sit in the window’s embrasure.

 _The Executive Committee nominated by the Council is in need of your advice,_ it read.  _Come at once._

“Let us go,” Maxime said, already on his way to the door.  “I fear there is little time.” 

**Hôtel de Ville , 11:05pm**

Here, within the sprawling maze of rooms that formed the Hotel de Ville, filled as they were with friends and colleagues and well-wishers, with slack-jawed gendarmes and members of the Guard, Maxime found himself greeted as a hero and embraced as a companion.  So loved and adulated did he find himself upon his arrival that he might have imagined his daylight hours no more than a dream, the product of an imagination grown putrid with the weight of denunciation and fear, bloodshed and loss.  How strange to have been one moment reviled as a bloodthirsty proponent of terror, a dictator poised to crush all opposition, and yet now to be embraced and called a hero, the saviour of the Republic.  As though two such creatures could even co-exist, enchained within one body, and not tear apart their fragile vessel.

In the fervour that gripped them all, the rush to embrace and to encourage, Maxime felt as though time had somehow hurtled backwards and he were back where they had begun.  His hands beat upon his own breast as they had on the day of their oath in the tennis court at Versailles.  Augustin, wild and passionate with fury at this injustice, climbed onto a chair to perch precariously with one foot upon the nearby table, the other upon the seat of his chair.  

“Listen, listen all of you,” Bonbon shouted, above the heads of the mingled audience.  “My brother will speak!”

Would he? Maxime hesitated.  He had not thought to, and yet now that they all turned their faces towards him, he saw that he must.  He gathered his breath.  Tried for words that faltered in his dry throat, scraped raw by his hours in the Convention.  He motioned for water and Bonbon passed him a glass.  He drank as a man, lost within a desert, would drain an entire well should he arrive at one.

“I am here,” he said.  “By your faith.  By your goodness.  You have shown tonight…”  He paused a moment, chest heaving for words that would not rise.  That were gripped in his throat by the force of his emotion. “You have demonstrated to all your patriotism and courage, in the face of these vile intrigues committed by a few within the Convention in order to deceive the representatives there.  There is no crime in standing against injustice, when _vertu_ and patriotism, _civisme_ and honesty, are themselves judged to be crimes.”

“Here, here,” Bonbon cried.  “It is to us that it falls, in the name of the people, to uphold liberty tonight!”

There came once more the applause and the cheers, as though all the fractious energy of the night were channeled now into their hands and tongues.  Augustin leapt down, bright and roguish.  _Still a boy at heart,_ Maxime thought, even as they embraced one another to a renewed round of cheers.  Maxime clutched him tight, and it was as though they were children again: Bonbon still soft, still fleshy in all the same places, his embrace as wholehearted as it had been at five and ten and fifteen.  He might have wept, had exhaustion not stripped him of the ability and opened instead a vast hollow within his breast.  It was instead Bonbon’s tears that fell upon Maxime’s cheek, as if he should cry enough for them both.

“You feel so thin,” Bonbon murmured, dashing the tears from his eyes as they pulled apart.

 _I am,_ Maxime thought.  _As though I have eaten only ash since Fleurus._

“Philippe?” he said instead.  “Antoine…?”

“Here.”

Maxime hardly dared turn at the sound of Antoine’s voice.  And then he did.  If Augustin’s embrace found him thin, then Antoine’s scraped Maxime down to the very bone.  What did his friends, his brother, see then?  Two friends like any other, locked in fraternal embrace.  They would not know how Antoine’s hand fit the small of Maxime’s back as though designed to fit there, nor how the curl of Maxime’s fingers through the ends of Antoine’s hair was a habit borne of clutching him close in passion.  They would not know how the glance of lip to lip, seizing but the smallest principality at the corner of each other’s mouths, had more in it of daring than of accident.  They would neither hear Maxime whisper, to the pale curve of Antoine’s ear: _‘I thought I should never feel your mouth again, my friend,’_ ; nor see that Antoine’s lips brushed the whorls of Maxime’s own as they withdrew.

 _What joyous, wonderful cruelty, our love,_ Maxime thought, _what frightful, terrible blessing._

**1:00am**

Beyond the windows and down below, in the Place de Grève, men were slipping away.  It had begun quietly enough, one or two here or there, little groups that wandered off to wine-shops and never returned.  Now came the news that whole detachments had vanished into the night, returning to the Sections that first sent them.  In vain the Council ordered the front of the building illuminated, for still their numbers ebbed like a tide.  As the sea draws back to leave upon the sand a chaos of washed-up pieces from its depths, so it was with the Sections: what had been a crowd was now little more than a dissolute mingling of drunken, gambling Guards and a few loyal forces.

Antoine paced ‘round the room, seldom constrained in one place, ceaseless in his movement.  More often than not, however, he returned to the windows to watch.  His expression might have been taken for impassive, were it not for the slight furrow of his brow.

“It is too soon,” Antoine said, when Maxime finally seized an instant in which to join him.

Maxime glanced out into the night.  “You mean to say…?”

“Tyranny makes no men.  It only makes souls of wet, misshapen clay that beg to be molded by stronger hands,” he sighed.  “Rousseau himself said it: the general will is never wrong, but it may be misled.  Thus will those accustomed to the yoke and the rein, hoping it will also yield shelter and sustenance, be quick to bend their necks again for the promise of a subordination that will bring them ease.”

“Have you lost hope, then?”  
Antoine smiled at that, and met Maxime’s eyes at last.  “Never.  But perhaps what I see of hope belongs to later ages, and days that are only dreams for now.  It is no shame to die a man on his feet, if one must die at all.”

“Antoine…”

They were broken apart by a great noise and clamour from the direction of the staircase.  So loud was it, echoing upon the steps and against the stone walls, that Maxime’s heart seemed to echo its force within the confines of his chest.  He peered again into the night, but down below all was as it had been, no sign of the conspirators or their men creeping amongst the assembled forces.  Upon the heels of this tumult, came the ringing sound of a familiar voice.

“Why,” Philippe exclaimed from across the room.  “It is Georges at last!”

He arrived but a moment later within the Council chamber, borne on the back of Muron: that sturdy, loyal gendarme.  For a moment the only chaos was the rush they made to embrace him, so forceful a greeting that several times Muron staggered beneath the onslaught.

“Enough, enough.  Well, Muron, they say I have desired a throne but it is not to be your back.  Set me down, Antoine, your arms please, yes, there.”  Thus delivered of this sudden flurry of words, Georges was swiftly free of the sling in which Muron carried him.  With his arms about Antoine’s neck, and his weight supported by the younger man’s arm about his waist, he leveled his gaze at them.

“My God, my God,” he said.  “What is it you have all been doing in my absence?  Are these our forces?  We must write to the armies, then.  Antoine and Philippe, your reputations precede you there, I should imagine...”

“We cannot write in the name of the Convention or the Commune,” Maxime put in.  “It will be intercepted.”

“The people, then.  They are the ones we serve at any rate.  Antoine, my dear friend, set me down will you?  No, no, upon the floor is all right, I can write as well here as anywhere.”  Antoine did so, and immediately ink and paper were brought.  Georges, upon his knees, began to write and then hesitated.  He glanced back up at them.  

“There are still humane beings in France, after all,” he said.  “And virtue will triumph in the end.”

**1:33am**

“They do not come, old friend,” Maxime said.

He had thought, as the minutes ticked by, as more detachments of the Sections dribbled away, as the Guard slouched off or returned drunk to their posts, to be angry.  To be angry or perhaps crushed by sorrow at their abandonment.  Instead there was almost a peace: it was decided, the moment inescapable now.  He could no longer live in this world anyway.  He could no more imagine waking every day in a world where dissolution reigned as triumphantly as in the days of kings, than he could imagine abandoning his principles.

_I am tired._

“I thought…” Georges said.

The bafflement in his friend’s gentle voice was like a nail driven through Maxime’s very soul.  Maxime put his hand upon George’s shoulder.  He left if there so the other man might lower his head to it and shed some few tears into the concealment of the cloth.

“I know,” Maxime said.

Yes, there was almost a peace. A peace, or an emptiness very like it. 

**1:45am**

The rooms of the Hotel de Ville were like an inferno, the heat of so many bodies and such activity so heavy that it was difficult to breathe.  Maxime’s back ran with sweat and his cravat chafed the skin of his neck.  If the stormy weather outside had carried with it the promise of cooler air, it seemed now to lay across the city like a stifling blanket.  Escaping it, or perhaps escaping the oppressive silence hanging over them, Maxime had come to sit by Philippe at the top of the great staircase.  

“I will make a Roman end of it,” the younger man said.

Maxime glanced at him.  His face was flushed pink above the white cut of his collar; his eyes possessed a glossy sheen, like blue sky seen through a rain-streaked window.  Where, Maxime wondered, are all my fine words now?  Why do they desert me?  He was still silent when Philippe pulled the pistol from his pocket and set it down on the patch of stone separating their hips.  Maxime picked it up.  He smoothed his thumb along the dark wood of the grip, his fingers along the cold steel of the barrel.  He did not think about it.  He did not ask.  He knew.  He put it in his pocket.

“Poor Babet.  I fear I am a coward,” Philippe said, his voice shaking, coming apart at all the tightly held seams.  He was too gentle a thing, Maxime thought, for such cruel times. "Am I, Maxime, a coward?”

“You, my friend, are the most courageous of all of us.”

**1:49am**

Bonbon’s arm, draped around Maxime’s shoulders, should have been heavy.  Today, it felt no more a weight than some gossamer, immaterial thing.

“I was thinking of Charlotte,” Bonbon said.  “How I should like to see her again.  If she has forgiven us for casting her aside, of course.”

“Charlotte forgives everything, but forgets nothing.”

“Even so.  I should like to see the Scarpe again too.  Perhaps next Spring, when it is full again.”

“Yes,” Maxime said.  “In Spring.”

**1:52am**

“But a moment…”

Maxime’s voice sounded terse, even formal, perhaps.  His fingers, where they clutched the cuff of Antoine’s coat, told an entirely different story.  Antoine’s hand shifted so that, secret and unseen, the backs of his own fingers brushed the inside of Maxime’s wrist.

“Though in Hades the dead may forget the dead,” Maxime recited. “Yet even there I shall always remember my dear companion.”

Antoine smiled.  He let go.

**All time is lost...**

“Long live Robespierre!  Long live the Republic!”

For the second time this night, those words.  Only this time they gave way, mere instants later, to shouting and clamour: the curtain pulled aside, the players unmasked.  Maxime leapt up from the desk where he had been signing letters mere moments before, barely feeling how his thighs smashed against the wood as he rose.  Such a wave overcame him then: of heat, of the rolling, trembling beats of his heart, of an energy that gathered in his fingertips and twisted, devouring itself, in his belly.  From the direction of the Council came raised voices, a clash of arms, the thud of boots on stone.

“Couthon!” Payan yelled, silenced a moment later, Georges’s name bitten off upon the tongue.

“They’ve come, Maxime!”  Philippe’s voice, as he rushed past the doorway, barely sparing him a glance.  “The time…”

“Philippe, steady…” Antoine now, like a flash of light in Philippe’s wake, reaching for his friend.

“I can’t…”

The rattling of a door handle.  Philippe’s curse no more than a low, mournful wail of despair.

“Philippe, listen to me.  A moment…listen!”

Maxime felt in his pocket, finding the smooth, hard lines of the pistol.  He picked it up and tested its weight in his hand.  He raised it towards his chin.  A test, no more.  A curiousity.  How it felt.  Whether he could.  It would be easier.  Now.  

 _Without Antoine to see,_ his addled thoughts suggested.

“This is…  Philippe…”

“My good friend, I…”

Maxime closed his eyes.  It was not at all like Socrates, in the end: the stillness of hemlock.  You could accept a thing and still your hand would tremble.  He knew that now.  His hand shook so hard it shifted the barrel to and fro so he must press harder.  Be certain.  Very certain.

“Ah, you…”

Maxime’s eyes opened at the sound of a coarse voice.  A gendarme stood in the doorway, sneering, his pistol raised and trained upon him.  Maxime glanced aside as Philippe’s voice reached a fevered pitch.

“The Republic!” Philippe cried.  “ Antoine, adieu, my dear…”

From outside the other room, a report loud as thunder.  

And one closer by.

*********

It was the pain that woke him.  Maxime had been wandering somewhere dark, formless, where the few sounds that reached him were like noise carried through deep water, filtered and distorted.  He woke to a blazing pulse of pain that radiated from chin to jaw, that settled like a hand across his face.  Antoine bent over him, his face in shadow and the light ‘round his head like a halo.  Maxime came to realise some few things: that he was supported upon his friend’s knees, that Antoine’s red-streaked fingers were idly stroking a lock of hair by his ear, and that his friend’s dark eyes held sorrow deep enough to drown in.

 _Do you tend me, mon ange?_   Maxime would have asked, only just now he could not precisely- for some reason- get his mouth to work.  Some obstruction.  Some piece of rigging that seemed to have torn loose.

It was over, yes, he knew it.  Only the guillotine awaited, and they would go together, be lain together in that gaping pit.  Somehow, Maxime wanted to smile, to encourage his love: _do not look so sad, it is the end of all great stories._   He should smile to show his courage.  What was this pain that forbid it?  What was this sour, salty torrent in his mouth?  What sharp rocks filled it, as though the dirt of the grave had already been thrown upon his head?  Maxime coughed and it came up hot and wet upon his face, like molten glass.

 _I’ll reach for you, even in the grave,_ he thought, _it is my body’s nature.  But we, our souls, will be somewhere far better.  I know it._

Through the pain and this strange sensation in his mouth, he wanted to smile.  And then he heard Couthon’s voice, groaning, groaning somewhere…a long, unending moan of deepest agony.  He heard Augustin’s name.  He heard, he heard, and there was a sound that stretched his lungs, a sound that filled his throat.  A sound…

He could not make it.

*********

There was no time in this place.  No time, here, where he moved between wakefulness and the sleep that lunged for him, cold and all-encompassing as the grave he knew was waiting.  Maxime who had so recently hoarded every minute, felt them all fly apart and scatter, like a man who has dropped a bag full of coin and now cannot find all the pieces.  
Who could say, then, which part of these moments were dream and which reality: the cursing of the guards, the jolt of the stretcher, the jeers of the gathered crowd who called him a handsome king, or threatened to throw him onto the dung heap, the table they lay him on in the ante-room of the chamber where he once worked.  Time smeared like a fingerprint upon a windowpane.

Another dream, it must be:

“One side now,” came a gruff voice.  “Let these gentlemen see their king sleeping on a table, just like a man.”

Antoine, alive and well alongside Payan and Dumas, not so much as a scratch upon his pale face.  He came in, and Maxime thought of sentiment and purity, of how the honesty of grief in his great, dark eyes became him as lesser men draw the eye by gaudiness and jewels.  There was a stir amongst the audience at the very sight of him, a sudden nervousness and something like embarrassment or pity from most, the bitterest hatred and mockery from some few others.  Maxime’s breath quickened almost involuntarily, his body struggling to form the words he wanted.

“Sire,” one man said to Antoine, giving a sweeping mockery of a bow and motioning in Maxime’s direction.  “Your Majesty suffers.”

“You aren’t finishing your speech, though it was well begun.  Have you lost your voice, boy?”

Antoine paid them no mind.  He was close, now.  Close enough for Maxime to see the small flecks of blood on the cream of his coat, upon his cheek and nose.  To see how cruelly they had bound him, the drift of bruise and blood above and below the rope.  Maxime’s eyes closed.  He wanted to find Antoine there, somewhere, in that waiting darkness, in some different place.  To pass through what must be the veil of sleep and dreams and wake upon its other side: summer in Paris, a lingering dawn in which his limbs tangled with Antoine’s and he touched his fine, slim wrists and said to him: _my love, my very dear, I had a dream the world ended and you came to me, your wrists bound so cruelly they were cut and ringed with bruises._   He could not reach it though, no matter how he tried, but rather kept tumbling back to this place: this table, his stockings ‘round his ankles, Antoine’s face as lovely and agonised as Saint-Sebastian’s.

Maxime knew reality only later: when the key was propped within his mouth to stretch it wide, stinking of copper and tasting more bitter than the thick blood still flowing down his throat.  When the surgeon put his thick, coarse fingers deep in his mouth and yanked free the loose teeth.

Then, yes, he knew reality.  Knew it, and was silent ‘round the rage and terror and humiliation of it all.

*********

_Pen.  Paper._

In the prison cell, Maxime’s frantic hands made signs for these objects.  The hour approached.

 _Éléonore…_  
  
There were things he had not told her: of her courage, of her friendship, of how oft’ her mercy and goodness had been invaluable to him.  He had farewelled them all, his companions, but her, near to dearest of them all.  _Keep Brount with you,_ he thought to say, _you will both be sad, I think, without me.  As I am sad to think of you both, who had supposed our friendship to be eternal.  And it is, I am sure it is, though not here or now.  Another time._

 _Pen,_ he signed, mouthed, though even that small gesture made his bandaged jaw pulse and ache.  _Paper._

It never came.

*********

In the little cell, by the light of a sun just beginning to set, the executioner and his attendants readied him.  They took Maxime’s wig, grey with dust and faded powder, and snipped the queue that Antoine was wont to wrap ‘round his hand to bind Maxime close.  They combed free the thin strands of Maxime’s hair and sheared them close to the nape of the neck, the whine of cold steel loud in his ears.  The coat he had worn but twice- once in dedication to his Creator, once in dedication to a man before the eyes of that same Being- they pulled down about his shoulders.  The dirty, bloodstained cravat was unwound in a series of sharp, merciless tugs before their hands closed upon his collar and tore it wide for the blade to slice away.

 _How absurd,_ Maxime thought, _we take up one blade to bare a man’s throat for another._

To go to one’s death, then, was not so difficult a thing as he had imagined.  Indeed, as he was led out to the waiting carts, there was a part of him that felt as though he had pierced that veil already, and all that remained was for his body to follow.  He felt neither the anger and resentment he feared, nor any great despair.  Indeed, if he felt anything it was but a sublime and tender love for a nourished dream and a people yet unborn and unknown.  Ah, to die without having to become a traitor to one’s nation, let alone oneself: was that not a greater victory than many would ever know?  It would all pass soon, he thought: the pain that rendered Augustin insensate as he was loaded into the tumbril, the confusion stamped upon Couthon’s face as he beheld the screaming crowd, the agonies of poor Hanriot, so brutalised in his capture, so punished for the loyalty they branded treason.  _We have served,_ he thought, _and now we may rest, my friends._

If anything stirred him, it was but this: the sight of Antoine emerging between two guards, drawn up to his full height, his head raised.  The long curls that Maxime had coiled ‘round his fingers were cropped short, revealing the long line of his white throat and the bleeding scratches upon it.  The cream-coloured coat was gone, and all the buttons upon his white vest ripped away, save one that had been buttoned at the top for the sake of modesty.  Even so, the collar of his shirt had been cut and torn so roughly that both garments slipped down one pale, thin shoulder to bare his breast.  A red carnation bloomed like an open wound in a buttonhole of his waistcoat: a mockery of his beauty, his softness, his youth.  Seeing him thus, with the bruises of rough handling budding upon his bare skin, Maxime wanted nothing more than to climb down and cover him again.  And yet when Antoine’s eyes met his, there was nothing within them but certainty.  The shadow of a smile graced the chapped curves of his lips.  _Soon,_ it seemed to say, and Maxime bowed his head to the promise.

They made but a pitiable cortege through the streets of Paris, towards the Place de la Révolution.  So slow, they moved, in deference to the crowds that lined the way: sometimes because they were blocked, at other times simply to draw out these last humiliations.  Maxime, looking out upon them, could see little more than a people misled and manipulated, unused to freedom and seeking instead the comfort offered them, as a hungry beast will seek to take the meat even when it suspects a trap, or the beaten horse return to its stall and hay, for it knows nothing else and freedom terrifies it.  Maxime closed his eyes again and found himself drifting listlessly between two points: the one of consciousness, the other of a deep, all-encompassing sleep that threatened, each time, to hold him beneath its surface ever longer.  Long enough, perhaps, that there would be no more surfacing.

It was not until they reached the square, with its great platform and that fell device towering above it, that Maxime opened his eyes again.  Then it was only that he might be helped down to stand against the cart, Augustin by his side, Couthon close by in a chair they had brought for him.  Maxime’s hands ached to touch his brother, to offer him some last consolation, but the gendarmes holding him upright afforded no such opportunity.  Instead, Maxime turned towards the cart and leaned against it.  He had never watched the machine: neither from prurient interest or from malice.  He was no man of blood.  Yet he could not escapt the roll of drums and the call of names, the sound of their brave steps climbing the stairs, the fall of the blade, the cheers that greeted it.

“Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just.”

Maxime sucked in a great breath of air, more like a sob.  _“Be thus, only,”_ he had said, that final night, his mouth everywhere upon him. _“Antoine…Léon…Saint-Just.”_   Did his friend recall it, as he bent to embrace Georges one final time and kiss him goodbye?  As he stood before Augustin to offer his farewell?  As…

“Adieu,” Antoine said.

Maxime could do no more, for a moment, than nod and trust that Antoine would understand him.  That he would still be waiting upon the other side.  It was only when Maxime had mastered himself that he turned ‘round.  Antoine’s lips, as he mounted the steps, bore that same mysterious smile.  _Soon,_ it said.  Maxime could not take his eyes from him.  Could not help but watch him, as he had been watching him from the moment he arrived in Paris, from that first day when he rose to speak against Louis Capet, as he had done for every day since.  Maxime would show all of Paris, all of France, the pride Aristogeiton took in Harmodious, though the ache in that heroic chest must have been as the same as that which now pierced Maxime’s.  A pain that bit deep with the fall of the blade, the roar, the casting aside of that body he had held in his arms who knew how oft’?

Maxime watched, then, his friends, his brother, pass.  Some went wordless and still, and some with curses.  They allowed Augustin to collapse briefly against him before being drawn away.  It was only when they took Georges, when they twisted his body to the plank and his screams rent the air, that Maxime allowed himself so much as a sound.  A weak cry that he smothered against the wood of the tumbril, coughing against it and the sudden heave of his empty belly.  And then that too was done.

 _“Together,”_ Antoine had said.  _“To the very end.”_  

And now the time drew near: his own name called, the drum beaten.  His heart thundered to its time though not, he thought, with undignified terror.  No, it was something more like an excitement, a kindled hope, a promise.  Maxime’s foot touched the step at the base of the platform.  Above him stood the machine: impartial, cold, its blade wet with his friends’ blood.

 _Together,_ he thought, and might have smiled were it not for his injury.

Up he climbed, unshaking, unbowed.  Himself, even to this very end.  Upon the top step he stood but a moment.  He looked out, at first, across the square and the people gathered in it.  Then to the weighted blade.  At last, his gaze traveled somewhere beyond, to the empty, blue vault of sky stretched over Paris.

 _Soon,_ he thought, _soon._  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **General Note:**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  Apart from the usual sources, this section draws on details from Mathiez's _The Fall of Robespierre_ and Sanson's _Memoirs of the Sansons_. Saint-Just's speech in the Convention, as well as the dialogue during the session of 9 Thermidor, is drawn from Florian Kappelsberger's translation located [here](https://www.academia.edu/27494745/Session_of_9_Thermidor_Year_II).
> 
>    
>  **Notes:**
> 
>   **You said, once, such commitments could not be written:** In the _Fragments_ , one of the statements Saint-Just makes regarding 'the affections' are that friends, making an oath to one another, are not permitted to write these as vows. Robespierre's joke is that the act of defending him is, in and of itself, a written commitment.
> 
>  **Saint-Just and Robespierre at the Convention:** I've read perhaps five different versions of this, including that Saint-Just and Robespierre arrived together, that they arrived separately, that they both stood at the foot of the tribune for an hour and so on. What seems certain is that Couthon had no idea of what was happening that day. Based on the sources I've used, and given Saint-Just's note to the Committee to tell them that he would go straight to the Convention to 'open his heart', it seems more likely that he was still composing the final report at home on the morning of the 10th, having gone there after his final meeting with Robespierre. Also, it seemed highly unlikely that they would stand at the tribunal for an hour- which surely would have seemed suspicious- and the translation of the session makes no reference to any such thing, so I've had them remain in the stands.
> 
>  **Lycurgus:** The Spartan law-giver.
> 
>  **An image of swords and flowers:** Robespierre harks back repeatedly to the story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the pair of ancient lovers who assassinated the tyrant Hipparchus (and attempted to assassinate Hipparchus' tyrannical brother, Hippias). Harmodius, the younger of the two, conceals his blade in a ceremonial myrtle wreath. Effectively, the pair reflect an ideal of politicised, homoerotic relations as being essential to revolutionary or liberatory politics (the counter to that, as Robespierre notes, being that counter-revolutionary thought twists the image by emasculating Saint-Just and casting his behaviour and appearance as 'effeminate').
> 
>  **Aiai! Who ever would have thought my name...** A line from Sophocles' tragedy of _Ajax_. 
> 
> **On the back of Muron:** By 1794, Couthon was no longer able to walk independently. As noted in L'Automne, he possessed an early form of wheelchair that seems to have been in consistent use, but the records of the 9-10 Thermidor indicated that he arrived with Muron. Muron was a gendarme more or less assigned to Couthon to provide him with the physical support necessary to move around spaces like the Convention/CPS and other areas that were inaccessible by wheelchair. Depictions show Couthon in what is basically a large 'basket', however that word doesn't quite convey the structure, so I've rendered it here as 'sling' (which is a more accurate mental image).
> 
>  **Pocket pistols:** As the name indicates, a smaller form of pistol that could be carried in the pocket rather than hooked through a belt or sash. See [here](https://gunculture2point0.wordpress.com/2017/10/16/pocket-pistols-17th-and-18th-century-flintlock-editions/).
> 
>  **Though in Hades...** A line from _The Iliad_. Achilles swears that, though the shades are meant to forget their loved ones, he will remember and find Patroclus in the Underworld.
> 
>  **Additional Note:** This last chapter could not have even been written without the sheer, beautiful genius of Pomme's [On brûlera](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jabih9mV6RQ), with it's exceptionally strange, marvelous mingling of grief, hope and- above all- pride. When I heard it, I knew _that sound_ and _that emotion_ was what I felt was accurate to the 'feel' of those final moments and the courage and loyalty involved in them.


	4. Elysium

The cottage was there from the very first day (if day it could be called, for time reckoned itself very differently here than elsewhere). 

“Why, it is Blérancourt,” Antoine had cried, pulling Maxime with him across the field.

There was the house in Blérancourt, and a river that ran alongside it which was not- in Maxime’s view- the river of Elysium, though its waters were always sweet and cold. No, it was, as he told Antoine, the Scarpe in early summer. And because it was the Scarpe in early summer, they should lie beside it together, in a nest of long, warm grass, and read to one another some bits and pieces of poetry, or speak of philosophy, or play the flute and enact some performance. Or sometimes- oh, most daring!- they should slip off their clothes like young boys and go to swim in the river’s gentle waters.

Sometimes, Maxime thought they were forgetting something. That something had happened, once, a very long time ago that he ought to recall. That there should be some bitter amongst this long and lingering sweetness. Such thoughts, however, were akin to a loose tooth that one wobbles about with one’s tongue: minor and largely painless. Over time, such as time was, here, he supposed that he merely forgot that something was forgotten. Sometimes, though, he might read a particular line he had written and the thought would return again: that somewhere, sometime, he had said it.

Here, however, there was little else to disrupt their days. Maxime’s hair grew long again (or perhaps it had always been long, here). He spent much of his time poring over the copies of Rousseau and Plato, Homer and Ovid- that last, perhaps, being Antoine’s doing- that lined what Antoine had taken rather dramatically to calling ‘our library’. He wrote, too, though sometimes as he wrote that sense of memory returned like ripples beneath the surface of still water. He returned to his poems, which Antoine suffered amiably enough, yawning by a fire lit from habit rather than necessity. 

Antoine, however, spent more of the days outside: barefoot in the garden, his hair tied back and his sleeves rolled to the elbows. He taught Maxime how to dig the earth with his hands and at what depth to plant. Maxime abided these lessons mostly because they allowed him the pleasure of Antoine’s company, their hands together deep in the soil. Antoine, however, planted incessantly, and the smallest seed curled into life at the touch of his fingertips: whole trellises of green beans that they snapped from the vines and ate as they walked and conversed and debated, plums plucked from sprawling branches and shared in bites ‘til their lips met and the juice ran down their chins. 

They did not need to eat here, of course, and yet they did for the simple joy of it. They need not make love, either, in that there was none of what might be called a compulsion towards it. And yet they did, often and at great leisure. In the bed they shared, hastening to it at night with lips still sticky from dessert, lingering in sleep and then waking again only for the happiness of starting over. By the river, Antoine’s graceful fingers curling in the long reeds, leaves and bits of grass tangled in his hair; Maxime moving over him, in him, around him. Or the other way around, as it pleased them.

So it went for some time, until one morning a shadow appeared upon the horizon, bounding towards them. Maxime could not place it, for though there were animals of the forest here, they neither approached nor sought to escape. It was not ‘til the shape drew closer, ‘til Maxime heard a familiar, deep-throated bark and saw how the silly beast tripped over its own long legs, that Maxime realised. Realised, and went himself to tackle Brount down to the ground. 

And then one day- long after, or not so long, depending upon how one measures time and if it can be measured at all in such places- another shape appeared upon the horizon. This one, Maxime knew immediately. 

Antoine, who had been lying beside him and reading from a copy of Racine, sat up, alerted, perhaps, by Maxime’s sudden stillness. He covered his eyes against the light of a sun that wasn’t really there, and his mouth spread into a smile.

“Why,” he said. “That is…”

“Yes,” Maxime replied, already on his feet and tugging Antoine after him by the hand. “Let us go and greet her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear Readers,
> 
> Ah, and so we are at the end of this story.
> 
> Before I get on to any sort of broader commentary, let me just say that this epilogue- which I debated adding, but liked too much not to- is a call back to several things. Namely, it's a nod to Achilles and Patroclus via Robespierre's own deism, as well as tying back in with earlier chapters where Robespierre considered what an 'ideal' world (one at peace) would look like for him. So really, I mixed some of the 'rules' of the Afterlife, so that in the end he winds up with the two people he cares about the most (plus a dog), in an idealised and probably quite nonexistent rural France.
> 
> With that out of the way: while of course I thank anyone who reads this, I particularly want to thank those of you who've been with this story from the very beginning (when it wasn't intended to turn into a novel). Your comments and the faith you've had in this narrative have kept me going, particularly in times of doubt, and I genuinely, deeply appreciate that. I honestly could not have remotely expected, let alone conceived of the notion, that this would be received the way it has been and that in writing it, I would also come to find friends with whom I share so much in common. 
> 
> So again: thank you, a thousand times over.


End file.
